Steven Hart was born on April 7, 1946, and moved to Las Vegas, Nevada as a one-year-old with his parents, Nat and Sylvia Hart. After graduating from Las Vegas High School, Steven Hart went through an apprenticeship program to become a journeyman carpenter. He then enlisted in the United States Navy and joined its construction battalion during the Vietnam War.

Erma Linda Rivera was born in Morenci, Arizona, in 1952. In the Las Vegas Valley, where Linda has lived for over twenty years, she has promoted educational opportunities for youth, particularly in the Hispanic community. Both she and her husband moved from Montana, where her husband worked as a power plant operator on Yellowtail Dam, to southern Nevada to work on Hoover Dam in 1986. Linda was put in charge of the affirmative employment plan for her branch of the Bureau of Reclamation.

At the time of this oral history, Meyer Lansky II had found a sentimental attachment to his namesake, Meyer Lansky, his grandfather. Though it was considered against Eastern European Jewish tradition, Meyer II’s parents had named him after the grandfather.