Richard Wiley is author of numerous stories and the novels Soldiers In Hiding (winner of the PEN/?Faulkner Award for Best American Fiction) Fools' Gold, Festival for Three Thousand Maidens, Indigo, Ahmed's Revenge, and Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show ("The best book you've never heard of!"-anonymous). His most recent novel is The Book of Important Moments. Richard has lived and worked in Korea (where he was a Peace Corps volunteer), Japan, Nigeria and Kenya. Many of his stories are taken from those experiences.

Prentiss Walker was born October 18th, 1910 on an Indian reservation in Comanche County in southwestern Oklahoma. His youth was spent in Stockton, California, and Phoenix, Arizona. His father had been a minister in the Methodist Pentecostal Church. In 1933 he came to Las Vegas, Nevada. He worked in various places including at a café, the Mercury Test Site, a trailer park, a used car lot, and multiple retail stores. In 1956 he was ordained into the ministry of the Baptist Church.

Jacqueline Tilman MacFarlane was born on May 04, 1934 to Dorothy Reed Tilman and John Franklin Tilman. The family lived in Las Vegas in the 1930s. Her family moved to and lived in rural Nevada because of the Great Depression and eventually came back to Las Vegas, Nevada. She raised her children in the Fair Circle neighborhood during the 1950s and 1960s and worked in various casinos. After she left the Sahara Hotel and Casino in 1977, she began selling Vanda cosmetics, which she still does as of February 04, 2010.

Helen Cecil was born on November 4, 1916 in Silver City, Utah, but relocated to Las Vegas, Nevada with her parents for health reasons. Helen attended Las Vegas High School and then went on to work at Las Vegas High School for many years. She worked as a bookkeeper, movie theater usher, telephone operator, and secretary before she was married.

Darrell Luce was born on March 24, 1929 in Fort Worth, Texas. He worked at his father's appliance store, Luce and Goodfellow Appliance Store, and at Sears. He and his wife Jayne married in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1952.

Clark Crocker was born in 1920 in Westfield, Massachusetts and had various careers such as a pilot in the United States Navy and a teacher in Las Vegas, Nevada.