Long-time Las Vegas resident Ruth Evaline Hazard (née Worden) was born in Marshall, Michigan on June 25, 1907 to Joseph V. Worden and Mary D. Hare. She lived in Michigan until she moved to Las Vegas, Nevada in 1931. Over the course of her lifetime, she worked as a secretary, a bookkeeper/accountant, and worked at Baker and Hazard Realty (a property management company founded by C. D. Baker and H. E. Hazard).

Louis Alfred Conner Sr. was born September 16, 1942 to Hazel Blalark and Clarence Conner in Tallulah, Louisiana. Louis was an activist who gave tirelessly of his time and resources to his community. He was the first African American Food and Beverage Director in a Las Vegas casino. He served as a Commissioner of the Las Vegas Housing Authority, President of the North Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, President of the Nevada Black Chamber of Commerce and a board member for the Las Vegas Boys and Girls Club.

Kaku Makino, the King of Japanese Buffet, was born in 1943 and raised in Tokyo, Japan, in a traditional, wealthy family. After surviving mumps at age four, he suffered a severe hearing loss. His father encouraged Kaku to play baseball, and he excelled. But his father died when Kaku was twenty years old, and, the oldest of four sons, he had to support the family, and he became a chef--an occupation he followed for twenty years in Tokyo before following his younger brothers to the U.S. in 1989.

Born in Taiwan, naturalized citizen and District Court Judge Jerry Tao's family exemplifies the ways political systems affect people on the ground. Tao's grandfather wrote speeches for Chiang-Kai-shek until the mid-1960s, when Mao Zedong's Communist party began purging leaders of the previous regime. As a high-ranking government official, Tao's grandfather left China under threat of death and settled in Taiwan.

Second-generation physician Kochy Tang arrived in Las Vegas in 1999 to complete her Doctor of Osteopathy (D.O.) residency; she stayed because she became part of a congenial medical community. Tang's father, Y. Y. Tang, M.D., left China in the early 1940s to go to France and then to Boston to attend Harvard Medical School, graduating in 1945. He was drafted into the U.S. Army for the Korean War and served in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (M.A.S.H.) unit. After the war, he practiced alternative medicine in San Francisco and Reno.