Victor "Vic" George Atiyeh was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1923. He met Delores Hewitt while a student at Washington High School. They later married in 1944 and had two children. He attended the University of Oregon, but dropped out after the death of his father in order to take over the family carpet business, Atiyeh Brothers. He was a Republican politician and represented Washington County in the Oregon House of Representatives from 1959 to 1964, and in the Oregon Senate from 1965 to 1979. He was governor of Oregon from 1979 to 1987. He died in 2014.

Carleton E. Watkins, renowned nineteenth-century photographer of the American West, began his career in photography in 1854 at the age of 25. Born in Oneonta, N. Y. in 1829, Watkins relocated to California in the spring of 1851 and by 1853-1854 was living in San Francisco. There he was taught the art of photography by Robert Vance (1825-1876), owner of daguerreotype studios in San Francisco and San Jose. By 1856, Watkins had moved on to work as an ambrotypist in the portrait studio of James M. Ford (1827-circa 1877) in San Jose.

Sometime between 1856 and 1858, Watkins began operating as a freelance photographer in the San Jose and San Francisco areas and experimented with large-format outdoor photography using wet-plate collodion negatives. His largest surviving body of work prior to 1861 documents Las Mariposas, the California mining estate of Col. John C. Frémont. In 1861, Watkins traveled to Yosemite with a mammoth-plate camera. The thirty mammoth plates and one hundred stereoscopic negatives that he made during this trip were partly responsible for government protection of Yosemite as a national park and were published in Josiah Whitney’s The Yosemite Book in 1869, one of the first American books devoted solely to landscape photography. Watkins returned to Yosemite many times between 1861 and 1881 to photograph the park and even set up his own gallery there to showcase and sell his photography.

In 1865, Watkins opened his "Yo Semite Gallery" at 425 Montgomery Street in San Francisco. That same year, he won an award for "Mountain Views" at the San Francisco Mechanics' Institute Industrial Exhibition and, in 1867, won a bronze medal for his mammoth plates of Yosemite at the Paris International Exposition, earning him an international reputation as a landscape photographer. In July of that same year, Watkins traveled to Oregon to photograph Portland, Or. and the Columbia River area. Beginning in Portland, Watkins traveled south to Oswego and Oregon City on the Willamette River to photograph the area and north again across the Columbia to Vancouver in the Washington Territory. He then traveled east along the Columbia River, following the trade route of the Oregon Steam Navigation Company, finally leaving Oregon in November of 1867 with fifty-nine mammoth plates and one hundred stereograph negatives. Fifty of these mammoth views were exhibited in Portland in 1868 at Shanahan’s Art Gallery, garnering Watkins much acclaim. He also won the top award that year for a major exhibit of Pacific Coast photography at the San Francisco Mechanics’ Institute Industrial Exhibition.

In 1875, financial troubles and a nationwide economic slump caused Watkins to lose his studio in San Francisco, his gallery in Yosemite, and the entire collection of what is now known as his “Old Series” negatives. His business was sold to Isaiah W. Taber, who continued to print these negatives under his own studio imprint. However, by 1876, Watkins was up and running again, determined to re-photograph many of his famous views for what he called his “New Series of Pacific Coast Views.” As part of this series, Watkins made a return trip to Oregon in 1882, stopping at Portland and the Columbia River before continuing north to photograph the Puget Sound area of the Washington Territory and Victoria, British Columbia. He returned to Oregon again in 1883 to photograph Cascade Locks on the Columbia River, as well as other features of the river valley, and again during the winter of 1884-1885, when he photographed a winter blizzard that snowed in an Oregon Railway and Navigation Railroad train on its tracks in the Columbia River Gorge.

Carleton Watkins continued to photograph until the early 1890s, when his health began to fail. For the rest of his life, he lived in near blindness and poverty. All of his negatives were destroyed in the April 1906 earthquake and fire in San Francisco. For the next decade, Watkins lived under the custody of his daughter and the Napa State Hospital for the Insane and died on June 23, 1916. His photographs remain some of the earliest and most well-regarded visual records of the landscape of the American West and its early settlement.

Gerry Pratt was born in Vancouver, Canada, in 1927. He began his career in journalism at the Canadian Press, the Vancouver Sun, and the Toronto Telegram. In 1950, he and Barbara June Holstead were married; they later had three children. In 1954, he became a U.S. citizen, and the next year he began working for the Oregonian newspaper in Portland as a waterboy, eventually becoming the business editor. He was a writer for several newspapers around Portland, and was a contributor to the public radio program All Things Considered as well as multiple TV programs. He served as president of the Fred Meyer Savings and Loan Association, and sat on the board of several organizations, including the Meyer Memorial Trust. He died in 2016.

James "Jim" Anthony Redden was born in 1929 and grew up in Massachusetts. In 1946, while he was in high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, serving two years as a medic stationed in Japan, where he saw firsthand the effects of the bombing of Hiroshima. In 1951, he married Joan Johnson. After earning a high school diploma, he attended Boston College and Boston College Law School, where he graduated with a law degree in 1954. He practiced law in Massachusetts for a year, then came to Portland, Oregon, where he worked for various insurance companies before moving to Medford, Oregon, to build his own law firm. He was a Democrat who represented the 19th District in the Oregon House of Representatives from 1962 to 1969, serving as minority leader from 1967 to 1969. From 1970 to 1972, he was chairman of the Public Employee Relations Board. From 1973 to 1976, he was state treasurer, and then attorney general from 1977 to 1980, before he was appointed to the U.S. District Court by President Jimmy Carter in 1980. He served as chief justice from 1990 to 1995, whereupon he took senior status.

Norma Paulus was born in Nebraska in 1933. Her family relocated to escape the Dust Bowl, eventually settling in Burns, Oregon, in 1938. After graduating from high school, she got a job as secretary to the district attorney of Harney County. She later moved to Salem, Oregon, and worked as a secretary for Judge Earl Latourette; at age 24, she decided to go to law school. She took night classes at Lewis and Clark College and graduated in 1962. She passed the Oregon State Bar the same year. She met her husband, Bill Paulus, while she was at law school, and they married in 1958. She became an appellate lawyer in Salem and argued before the Oregon Supreme Court. She was appointed to the Marion County Boundary Commission by Governor Tom McCall in 1969, which was the beginning of her political career. She represented Marion County in the Oregon House of Representatives from 1970 to 1976. She then served as Oregon's first woman secretary of state from 1977 to 1985. She also ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1986. She was then appointed to the Northwest Power Planning Council, where she served from 1987 to 1990, and subsequently was superintendent of public instruction from 1990 to 1999. She later served as the executive director of the Oregon Historical Society from 2000 to 2003. She died in 2019.

Gerald "Gerry" Wendell Frank was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1923. He attended Stanford University, where he enrolled in the Reserve Officer Training Corps. He was called to active duty in the U.S. Army in 1943, and served in the European theater during World War II. During his Army training in California, he studied engineering at Loyola University. After his discharge in 1945, he remained in England and attended Cambridge University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in economics and a master's degree in politics.

After graduating, he returned to Portland and worked at the family business, the Meier & Frank department store. He opened and managed the Meier & Frank store in Salem, Oregon, in 1955. After the sale of Meier & Frank in 1965, Frank became involved with Mark Hatfield's political career, eventually becoming the senator's chief of staff. In 1981, he opened a dessert shop in Salem called Gerry Frank's Konditorei. He was a longtime contributor to the Oregonian newspaper and also authored a guidebook to Oregon, entitled "Gerry Frank's Oregon."

Frank died in March 2022.