A long time friend send me a request to parse the first name and last name from the dataset that you see below. I'm going to post the answer that I sent, but it was kind of fun so I thought I'd post it as an exersize and to see if anyone else had a better solution. Points for any answer better than mine.
declare @iv30102 table (itemdesc varchar(100))
insert into @iv30102 (itemdesc) values ('01/01/2010 Smith, Gabriella WHOLESALE')
insert into @iv30102 (itemdesc) values ('01/04/2010 Farnsworth,Joe WHOLESALE')