Ferdinand Alexi Ski Hilenski was born on January 1, 1947. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Tennessee in 1974. After receiving a Fulbright Scholarship in 1992, Hilenski began to work at Georgia Tech. Here, he served first as Director of Development at the College of Architecture and went on to work as the founding development officer at Ivan Allen College. Hilenski died of cancer on July 29, 2009.

Clarence Leon Brown was born to Larkin Harry and Katherine Ann (Gaw) Brown in Clinton, Massachusetts on May 10, 1890. The family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee in 1902, where Larkin Brown worked as a superintendent at Brookside Mills. Clarence Brown graduated from Knoxville High School in 1905 and went on to earn his B.A. in mechanical and electrical engineering from the University of Tennessee in 1910. For the next five years, he worked for the Stevens Duryea Company and established his own dealership, the Brown Motor Car Company, in Alabama. He soon grew restless and, fascinated with movies, moved to New Jersey to study under French director Maurice Tourneur at Peerless Studios. Here, the pair directed such movies as Deep Waters (1919) and The Last of the Mohicans (1920).

During the course of his career, Brown directed or produced more than fifty widely-acclaimed full length motion pictures and worked with many of the film industry's most illustrious performers, including Joan Crawford and Clark Gable in Chained (1934), Spencer Tracy in Edison the Man (1940), Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet (1945), and Gregory Peck in The Yearling (1947). He retired in 1952 after having won eight Oscars and received eight nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director. Brown remained involved with the University of Tennessee, donating the money to construct the Clarence Brown Theater in the 1970s and leaving the University an additional $12 million after his death on August 17, 1987. When combined, these sums made him the largest donor in the University's history.

Clarence Brown was married four times: first to Paul Herndon Pratt (sometimes given as Pauline or Paula; 1894-) on May 14, 1913, second to Ona Wilson (1884-1960), third to Alice Joyce (1890-1955) on March 31, 1933, and finally to Marion Ruth Spies (1905-1993) in 1946. He had one child, Adrienne (Brown) Adams Carillo, with his first wife.