Judith Lee Johnson Jones was born September 13, 1940 and spent her childhood in Oklahoma and Texas. In 1958, she was one of the winners of the Houston’s Chronicle contest that added the Texas Copa Girls to perform at the Sands Hotel and Casino. For Jones, the experience was a period of fun-filled freedom, followed by relentless encouragement from others to attend college, which she reluctantly did. To her surprise, she embraced college life, took her studies seriously, and received an education degree. She also became Miss Houston.

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.