Lawrence Seidman grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. He attended Culver Military Academy the first three years of high school, but graduated from Bay Village High School. He earned a bachelor's degree in business administration, and went on to law school at Case Western Reserve University. Lawrence and his wife moved to Chicago after he finished law school, where he worked in the First National Bank of Chicago doing estate planning and analysis. He wanted to try teaching, so he sent letters to many different schools. Ferris State College in Michigan gave him an interview, and he and his wife moved there for one academic year. The freezing cold winter convinced them that they did not want to stay in the Midwest, so Lawrence began writing letters to schools out west. UNR replied to the letter they received, saying they had no openings, but he might try Nevada Southern University in Las Vegas. The school was in the middle of changing its name to University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV). Lawrence flew out, interviewed with future colleagues, and accepted the job. He and his wife have lived in Vegas ever since 1969. Lawrence was the first full-time person hired to teach business law. He restructured the way the courses were developed and presented. A discipline officer was needed after the regents passed a new code of conduct and he was asked to take the position, which he did. Because the administrative or discipline officer reports to the president of the university, he got to know several of them rather well. Eventually, Lawrence became assistant general counsel, and also served as deputy attorney general for a while. His wife Janet pursued her degrees at UNLV, taught for about five years, and then worked at Children's Behavioral Services. Today they are both retired, and are enjoying traveling and working on their home. Lawrence occasionally teaches summer sessions at UNLV.

Pamela Sitton’s childhood stories follow her construction worker father’s journey from one job to the next. She learned to adjust to a family move at a moment notice, to play in the back of a pickup truck and lived in a series of trailer homes. Finally in 1963, they moved to Las Vegas, where her father worked at the Test Site. For Pam, it was a chance to finish her schooling in one town. She attended the original Las Vegas High School and then UNLV, where she earned a degree in English literature. She recalls the Vegas of the 1960s for her unique perspective—a time of war protests, working a series of part-time jobs from cocktail waitress to post office worker, and her path to marriage in 1973. A position at UNLV’s library had been a dream job that she finally achieved when hired in 1974 as a member of the circulation staff. She held various positions throughout the library and remembers the various library buildings as a student and a professional.

Dr. Robert Bruce Smith was born in Philadelphia and spent his first two years in New Jersey, but thinks of California as home. His father's calling as a minister had taken them back east, and after his seminary training they returned to Los Angeles, followed by a five year stint in Oregon before returning to Vista, California. After high school graduation, Bob left home to attend Wheaton College in Illinois, a small Protestant school. He met his wife there and after completing his Bachelor's in chemistry they were off to Berkeley, where he completed his PhD in three years. Along the way, Dr. Smith had worked for G.D. Searle in Skokie, Illinois, and at first thought that this was his calling. His semester as a Teaching Assistant, however, convinced him that the academic life was what he wanted. Late in 1961, he learned of a job opening at the Southern Regional Division of the University of Nevada (now UNLV), interviewed with Malcolm Graham who was recruiting in San Francisco, and flew to Las Vegas to see the campus for himself. It consisted of three and a half buildings surrounded by desert. Robert's thesis director encouraged him to take the job at this new, very small college, so he and his wife drove to Las Vegas to find an apartment. They fell in love with the area and he started at UNLV as assistant professor of chemistry. He did work in organic chemistry and served as chair of the Department of Physical Sciences, as it was then called. In 1968 the department was turned into a college, and Bob became the dean of the College of Science and Mathematics. He held this position for 12 years. In 1980, Dr. Smith accepted an offer from Weber State College in Ogden, Utah, and served there as Academic Vice President (later Provost) until his retirement in 1998. He recalls with great clarity the people, changes, and events that he was involved with during the early years at UNLV. Today he and his wife enjoy their retirement in their favorite spot in the San Jacinto Mountains.

Dr. Lonnie D. Spight grew up in northern Colorado, earned his bachelor's degree at Colorado State University, and his PhD at University of Nevada Reno. His interest in astronomy dates from his early years on the farm in Colorado, star-gazing in the fields at night. Before coming to UNLV, Lonnie worked for the Department of Defense on scattering cross sections and explosions. Working between Los Alamos and the Test Site, he was often in Las Vegas and had met most of the physicists at the university. He was invited midterm to take over a physics class for a faculty member who had fallen ill, and was offered a job the following fall of 1970. In the seventies when Dr. Spight arrived, the physics department was located in trailers, and the university campus was mostly desert. Lonnie served as chair of the department on several occasions, and was responsible for insisting that faculty members get involved in research, no matter how tight the budget. He worked on solar energy and far-field microwave analysis, and helped set up safety standards for the new laser technology. One of Dr. Spight's interests outside of physics is a love for classical music. He was a volunteer "Deejay" for 12 years with KNPR once it got started in 1980. Meanwhile, after 37 years with UNLV Lonnie retains his enthusiasm and love for teaching. Today he teaches quantum mechanics and hopes that one day he will be able to teach a particle physics course which ties together cosmology, the beginning of the universe, fundamental cutting edge physics, quarks, gluon plasmas, and more. He has the course materials ready to go and is looking forward to many more years at UNLV.

Jerome Jerry Jay Vallen was born and grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father was in the restaurant business and Jerry worked for him throughout his teens and young adulthood. He and his two brothers entertained themselves during their childhood years by going to the library and reading. This was a legacy of the Depression era, when there simply wasn't any money to spare for extraneous expenses. Jerry's first jobs were bellman / assistant manager in a small hotel; auditor, and then property manager at the Pine Tree Point Club. He attended Penn State for a year (working in his dad s restaurant the whole time) and then transferred to the hotel school at Cornell University. After a stint in the armed forces during the Korean War, he returned home and used the GI bill to finish his master's degree. He started on his doctorate, but it would be 20 years before he completed it. After getting married (1950) and starting a family, Jerry and his wife Flossie realized that the restaurant business and family life did not mix well, so he decided to stay in education. Fie spent several summers at the University of Pennsylvania in their graduate school of business and in 1966, interviewed with Jerry Crawford, provost at UNLV. Jerry and his family moved out to Las Vegas in June of 1967, leaving northern New York during a blizzard and arriving four days later in southern Nevada to find tulips blooming. They decided they liked Las Vegas, found a house right away, and settled in to their new life. Jerry taught marketing in the hotel college at the beginning of his career and for several years thereafter. Boyce Phillips took the rooms division and George Bussel taught foods. Their main focus was to attract students, and they worked on making it easier tor students to transfer from out of state. Jerry also thought it was extremely important that the hotel college be independent of university administration control. Dr. Vallen has 5 or 6 books published, including 3 textbooks that he continues to update, and an oral history of the hotel college completed shortly after he retired in 1989. Today he and his wife travel and enjoy twice yearly gatherings with their family.

Kathy War fondly remembers being raised and educated in Helena, Montana. She and her husband Tom married in 1968 during an uncertain job market. After a short time in Seattle, they came to Las Vegas in 1970. Kathy drew upon her library work experience to apply for a job with UNLV's library. For the next four-and a half years she worked in the Curriculum Materials Library (CML). She then worked in the Inter-Library loan department and eventually moved to Special Collections. As she prepared to retire, she spoke of the growth that had transpired in Special Collections from three positions to ten. She describes the process of archiving over 60,00 photos and mentions the Oral History Research Center as important accomplishments of that department.

Dr. William R. Wells was the first dean of engineering at UNLV. He was born in Winder, Georgia, and graduated from high school there. He attended Georgia Tech and then took a job with NASA in Virginia, where he also received a master's degree from Virginia Tech. He then went to Harvard for an MA degree, and ended up at Virginia Tech, earning a PhD in aerospace engineering. Dr. Wells had an impressive twenty-year work history in Ohio and Illinois before coming to UNLV in 1986. He came in on the ground floor of the newly endowed college of engineering and saw the college through several rounds of accreditation with ABET. He remembers the small student body and how easy it was for faculty members to interact with them. He also recalls that several local and state entities contributed money to the engineering program or hired graduates. As dean of the College of Engineering, Dr. Wells was involved in 'growing' the various departments. He has seen most of them develop masters and PhD programs, and remembers recruiting for new teaching positions. He also recalls moving into the new building in 1988. Accreditation was of major importance in the development of a significant and nationally recognized engineering college at UNLV, and Dr. Wells has his opinions as to its impact on creativity. He does believe that it is a necessary part of developing excellence and accountability to the community, the students and faculty, and the state. Dr. Wells talks about recruiting, faculty turnover, and salaries. He gives his opinions on using UNLV engineers for stage and set designs on the Strip, hiring graduates at local utilities, and helping students with deficient math or science skills. He also talks about attracting minority groups to engineering, diversity among the faculty, and the importance of keeping talent in the United States.