A native Nevadan who bridged the old and new in the state's history, Ruthe Deskin was an influential Las Vegas journalist for almost half a century. She was born in Yerington (which she insisted on calling by its original name, Pizen Switch) to Jim Goldsworthy, a mining engineer, and Viola West, of a Mason Valley pioneer family.

The Las Vegas Strip of the 1940s and 1950s epitomized its times. Hollywood was peaking and television was entering every household, and Las Vegas enjoyed close ties to Los Angeles and Hollywood. Highway 91 provided the majority of visitors from Los Angeles, and Hollywood stars were frequent visitors and performers. Just as Walt Disney capitalized on the media and catered to fantasy by opening Disneyland in 1955, Las Vegas hotels offered their own fantasyland of luxury and the chance to rub elbows with the famous and beautiful.

Nevada has almost always ranked near the bottom in state population, yet its leaders in Washington often have been among the nation's most powerful.

That might seem contradictory. But the key reason has been the United States Senate. Like most legislative bodies, it long has operated on the seniority system: the longer a senator serves, the likelier he or she will chair a committee, especially a powerful one like Appropriations, which doles out federal funds, or Judiciary, which considers some of the president's most important appointments.

Morris Barney Dalitz was born on December 24, 1899, in Boston, Massachusetts, and raised in Michigan, where his father operated a growing laundry business. When prohibition begin in 1919, bootleggers needed delivery mechanisms, and Dalitz's access to laundry trucks helped him enter that business.