May Bradford was born May 11, 1879 in Missouri. Her parents named her Cora May, but she almost always went by the name May. Growing up, she lived in mining camps in New Mexico, Colorado, and Oregon, where her father worked. She graduated from high school in Carthage, Missouri. She attended Stanford and studied art and mathematics, earning her degree in 1902. She then taught high school for one year in Seattle, Washington to earn the money to go to Paris and study art and was able to spend the next year in Paris.

Composer Massimo "Max" Joseph DiJulio was born in 1919, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He took up the trumpet as a boy and turned professional while still in high school. During World War Two he served with a military band under the direction of Glenn Miller. After his tour of duty, he settled in Denver, Colorado where he served as the Director of the Fine Arts Department at Loretto Heights College for over thirty years. He also served as Music Director of the Denver Post Opera.

Boulder City, Nevada community leader Peggy Hyde Phillips (1916-1997) was born Helen Thelma Lewis in Iowa in 1916. Her father gave her the nickname of Peggy as a child and she used the name for the rest of her life. She married Charles Hyde (1907-1956) in 1937. He served in the United States Army Air Corps and worked as a flight instructor at Condor Field in Twentynine Palms, California during World War II. After the war, the family relocated to Boulder City, Nevada. They opened Desert Trails, a sporting goods and toy store in 1946.

Matthew O'Brien is a journalist, author, and college instructor who is known for his nonfiction book Beneath the Neon about homeless people living underground in the Las Vegas Valley. He lived in Las Vegas from 1997-2017. O'Brien was born in Washington D.C. but grew up in Atlanta, GA, where he graduated from the University of West Georgia in 1995. He also earned an MFA from UNLV. O'Brien was a staff writer, news editor and managing editor of the alternative weekly Las Vegas CityLife from 2000 to 2008.

Jerry Duane Morlan (1938-2000) was born and raised in Victorville, California. He worked as a letter carrier for the U.S. Post Office from 1960 to 1965 before his eight-year tenure as an industrial photographer at Teledyne Semiconductor in Hawthorne, California. After Teledyne, Morlan was a successful general supervisor of the graphic arts department of leading toy manufacturing company Mattel, continuing to work as a photographer and sometimes acting as a consultant for the Yankee Photo Products company.