Paul Christensen was born on August 26, 1932. He grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada during the World War II era. His parents were M.J. and Hazel Christensen, founders of a jewelry business. He attended the Fifth Street Grammar School, the John S. Park School, and Las Vegas High School. Too young to enlist, he was of an age that could focus on his education and opportunities for success. He attended college, earned a marketing degree, and joined the Air Force ROTC program. He flew B-47 bombers during the Cold War.
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Adelaide Robbins was born in Manhattan (New York, New York) to a father who was a pianist and arranger and a mother who was a dancer on Broadway. She grew up as an only child in the theater district where she was exposed to the arts from a young age. She began piano lessons at age six and began working professionally by the age of 12. She attended the High School of Music and Art for four years.
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Dennis McBride grew up in Boulder City, Nevada, and received both his BA and MA from UNLV. He is well-known as an expert in the history of Hoover Dam and has done several histories of Boulder City. He has chronicled and collected the history of the LGBTQ community in Las Vegas since the late 1970s, and his work culminated in the manuscript "Life in the Neon Closet: A History of Gay Las Vegas" published in 2017.
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James Fox "Jim" Dunbar was Caesars Palace Hotel and Casino's longest-tenured employee. He was born on June 22, 1938 in Los Angeles, California. His parents were Harold Leslie Dunbar and Elaine Mary Greenberg. Dunbar's father moved the family to Las Vegas, Nevada in 1943 to work as a taxi driver. On August 4, 1966, Dunbar worked at Caesars Palace at its grand opening as a valet, and continued working as a Caesars Palace valet until 2018. He died March 29, 2019.
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Helen (Collins) Morelli was born in 1905 the oldest of nine children born to Elizabeth McCann and James P. Collins. Her father was an New York Police Department officer and suffered a heart attack, which widowed her mother. Helen helped her mother raise her siblings as both her mother and her uncle (who moved in after her father's death) worked outside of the home to support the family.
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Artemus W. Ham Jr. was born in 1920 in Las Vegas, Nevada to Artemus W. Ham Sr. and his wife Atla Mereness Ham. He was the oldest of three children born to the couple. Ham Jr. attended the University of Nevada, Reno and Stanford University for his bachelor's degree. He then went on to earn his law degree at Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, California.
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Taken from bio on JHP: "Debbie Levy was born November 7th, 1958 in Richmond, KY. She spent her childhood in Pontiac, Michigan up until highschool when he parents moved the family to Tempe, Arizona, where she would later meet her husband, Andrew Levy. After they were married Debbie arrived in Las Vegas in 1978, where she enrolled at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she finished her degree and started her accounting practice. She ran her business for ten years before opening Art Starts Here, an art school.
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William Morgan was born in Kansas City, Missouri and moved to Las Vegas with his family in 1969. Morgan entered the slot industry early by becoming an instructor at his father’s gaming school which provided instruction on slot and arcade repair and maintenance. His start in the gaming industry was in 1989 when he became a slot technician at the Imperial Palace. Morgan would later move to the MGM Grand as a journeyman slot technician in 1993 and eventually to the Stratosphere in 1996 as shift lead slot technician.
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Judge Abbi Silver was raised in Boulder City, Nevada. She graduated from Clark High School in Las Vegas, Nevada and then University of Nevada, Las Vegas (1986).
She worked multiple jobs—waitress, Utah Jazz cheerleader, dancer—while earning her undergraduate degree and then her law degree from Southwestern University of Law, in Los Angeles (1989).
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