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.