Lucius Blanchard grew up in Ahoskie, North Carolina, and attended the University of North Carolina Medical School at Chapel Hill. After acquiring his medical degree, he joined the military for two years and upon leaving became chief resident for the University of Louisville. While there, he took dermatology training and cancer surgery training in the University of Wisconsin allowing him to specialize in skin cancer surgery.

Schwartz was born on May 13, 1926 in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He attended Colorado Military School in Denver, Colorado and the University of Southern California. He left the university without a degree and went into the merchant tailoring business in Los Angeles, California. After that business went bankrupt, he moved to Las Vegas, Nevada with his brother, Seymour Schwartz, around 1951 and started Schwartz Brothers Clothing.

Beth Molasky-Cornell was born November 29, 1950 in Florida and moved to Las Vegas, Nevada before her second birthday. She graduated from Valley High School in 1968, and started college at the University of Southern California at the age of seventeen. After spending a couple of years in Rhode Island, where she had her children, she moved back to Las Vegas in 1975.

Norma Friedman was born to Rose and Jacob Adler on July 22, 1935 and was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

In 1965, Chilean-born Mariteresa Rivera-Rogers (b. 1943) and husband Enrique Rivera set out on their adventurous leap and moved to the United States. Sponsored by an aunt living in Las Vegas, their resident visas took only three months to process—a task that would take years in today’s world she explains. Their first home was on Convention Center Drive, though they and their four children would experience several different neighborhoods over the years.

Meli Calvo Pulido was born in Mexico City and immigrated to the United States with her parents and eight siblings. In 1975, at 11:00 p.m. she woke up to the Silver Slipper on the Las Vegas Strip. She was raised on Las Vegas’s 28th Street, where she helped her family and their neighbors by becoming the neighborhoods unofficial translator. The need to serve her community and the hardships faced by her family and the families around her translated into her work after she graduated from what is now Southeast Career Technical Academy.