Professor strolls through UNLV history - 50 years, 300+ pages

By Charlotte Hsu

Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2007 | 7:34 a.m.

UNLV history professor Eugene Moehring has spent a career imposing deadlines on students completing projects.

Then one day, his boss - then-President Carol Harter - asked Moehring to take on her assignment. And there was a deadline.

Write a history book for the first 50 years of UNLV, she asked him. Have it ready for the anniversary in 2007.

He squirmed. His plate was full. "I've got a million projects going on," he told his boss.

At the time, Moehring was collaborating with College of Southern Nevada professor Michael Green on another book, a history of Las Vegas celebrating the city's centennial.

And he wasn't sure, frankly, whether he wanted to write a book about people he knew, including college presidents who had been pushed out of their jobs.

Harter persisted, and at a Christmas party in 2003 hosted by Sen. Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas, who is a UNLV political science professor, Moehring obliged.

Less than two years later , Moehring produced a manuscript for a 300-plus-page history of the university, in time for UNLV's 50th anniversary.

In researching and composing the book, Moehring embarked on a UNLV treasure hunt, tracking down people who walked the campus decades ago, paging through documents, fumbling with a microfilm machine and flipping through so many photographs.

He didn't want to disappoint. His job is history, and this was the history of his campus.

This is how a history writer maps out his day: Moehring would start working about 8 a.m., after his wife, Christine Wiatrowski, left for her job as a UNLV library technician. When she came home in the late afternoon, he would head to campus to teach. The two would go out to dinner after . Then, he'd take a nap, get up about midnight to do some more work, then go back to bed.

"I did my best work in the middle of the night, from 12 to 4," Moehring said.

And that sometimes meant leaving a message for his buddy, Green, at uncivil hours.

"Usually the rule is if I have a voice mail at 3 a.m., it's Moehring," said Green, a longtime friend and former student.

At 50, the university is still young. Harter recognized that Moehring would still have access "to the real - life actors" who may not be around in a decade.

"Being able to interview and talk about them gives future generations, forever, in perpetuity, knowledge of their institutions that they wouldn't be able to get as fully at another time," Harter said.

Some mornings, Moehring found former UNLV President and Nevada System of Higher Education Chancellor Donald Baepler standing outside the Harry Reid Center, smoking or talking on his cell phone. Moehring peppered him with questions that couldn't be answered by books, newspapers or other documents. During one chat, Baepler related why , years earlier, he wanted to bring basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian to UNLV from Cal State Long Beach.

The conversation translated into the history book this way:

"Baepler believed that by bringing Jerry Tarkanian to Las Vegas and building a nationally prominent sports program in basketball and perhaps also in football more local businessmen could be lured into funding UNLV's academic needs."

Moehring spent hours in the library reading old copies of the Las Vegas Sun, Las Vegas Review-Journal and Rebel Yell, UNLV's student newspaper, jotting down details in six thick, spiral-bound notebooks.

He read works by other academics on UNLV. He pored through materials in the library's special collections - "little things that you think people don't keep," manuscripts librarian Su Kim Chung said.

She helped Moehring get his hands on old yearbooks, old department newsletters and correspondence among officials that provided clues on land acquisition deals .

In time, Moehring tracked down most of what he needed.

At the library, he shunned new microfilm machines in favor of older ones he was more used to. Besides, he said, "No one's ever at the old machines."

Moehring's early drafts were written longhand, with individual paragraphs corresponding to his notes. Satisfied with the prose, he would type and print the words and paste them on sheets of 8 1/2- by 14-inch paper in the order he wanted them to appear in the manuscript. He wrote transitions between his carefully ordered paragraphs, then typed the effort.

He finished chapters on university presidents first so he could send them drafts for comment.

"It's always very difficult to do," Harter said about reading the chapter about her. "It makes you nervous because it's sort of looking inside your soul somehow and not knowing what you're going to see from somebody else's perspective."

She, Baepler and former President Pat Goodall were pleased with their chapters although Moehring didn't gloss over their imperfections.

"There was some stuff at the end, about which regents thought it was appropriate for me to step down, that I think to this minute are not accurate," Harter said of the book. But she excused Moehring, saying she had knowledge about her departure from the top job that Moehring didn't have - knowledge about people's thoughts that perhaps is not appropriate for a history book anyway.

Green took two weeks - with a cat lounging between his legs on the living room couch - to read the manuscript before offering his input. He suggested, for example, that Moehring add more details on Maude Frazier, the education leader to whom the book is dedicated.

After editing and last-minute additions, the book was sent to China to be printed. In July, Moehring got his copy.

And so it came to be: "The University of Nevada, Las Vegas: A History," a hard-covered book with 11 chapters and an epilogue, and a preface that begins: "In the fall of 2003 Carol Harter was UNLV's president, and she asked me to write a full-length history of the institution ..."