Jay Last and his wife, Deborah, have donated African art to the Fowler Museum at UCLA. He has also worked to preserve archaeological sites, founding a conservancy in 1989.

Material for Headliners vignettes was gathered from various sources including Wikipedia, Baseball Reference, Princeton, IMDB, Poison: Official Website, SRU Athletics, Oberg Industries, the New York Times and the University of Michigan.

Oct. 18, 1929 —Jay T. Last, a Butler native, was a physicist and one of the prominent founders of Silicon Valley.Last grew up in Butler during the Great Depression. His family grew their own food to survive. Between his junior and senior years at Butler Senior High School, he hitch-hiked to San Jose, Calf., for the summer.Prior to his graduation from BHS, Last began working with local industrial chemist Frank W. Preston in his glass and glass-fracture laboratory. After graduating from Butler in 1947, he enrolled at the University of Rochester to study optics. Last worked one year in the trouble-shooting department at Kodak before graduating from Rochester in 1951.He earned his Ph.D. in physics in 1956 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Last joined the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, run by William Shockley, in 1956 in California. Last left Shockley with seven other employees dubbed the “Traitorous Eight” a year later.Those eight founded Fairchild Semiconductor. In 1961, Last resigned from Fairchild and created Amelco Corporation, a division of Teledyne, with three other members of the “Traitorous Eight.” Last served as vice president of research and development for Teledyne from 1966-1974.Last and the other members of the “Traitorous Eight” are heralded as the “fathers of Silicon Valley.”In 2015, Last was named a distinguished graduate of Butler Senior High School.