Carrie Townley Porter was born July 07, 1935 in Central Texas near present-day Fort Hood. Townley finished high school in Austin, Texas and attended the University of Texas in Austin for two years. She left college to get married, and she and her geologist husband lived in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. They had three children with no reliable child care so Townley became a housewife for a period. The Townleys lived a full and active life in Las Vegas, Nevada and Carrie Townley eventually got hired as a substitute teacher.
Richard Morgan was born in 1945 Fresno, California. His parents moved to the San Francisco Bay, California area a few months later, where Morgan grew up and attended school. His father had moved there for the express purpose of giving his children the opportunity to attend the University of California, Berkeley. Morgan did, in fact, graduate from Berkeley in 1967 with a degree in political science.
Judy Jetter was born November 18, 1939 and was raised in Chicago, Illinois. At the age of three, she began taking acting, tap, and ballet classes. While raised by her mother until age 15, she was forced to study opera, even though jazz music was her passion. Jetter’s first introduction to jazz came while listening to, legendary jazz great, Woody Herman on the radio. She developed an immediate appreciation and love for jazz music.
Maurice “Maury” Halfon Behar was born August 27, 1938 in Biarritz, France and spent his early childhood in Bayonne, France. On January 12, 1944, the Nazis took his parents from their home, but Behar was left behind due to a bout with measles. He was then cared for by his neighbor, Marie Cazous, passing as her son, until he was adopted by relatives from the United States and moved to New York City, New York in 1947.