Jerry Bowles was born in Oak Hill, West Virginia in the same hospital where eight years later Hank Williams was pronounced DOA.  His subsequent brushes with fame and fortune have been equally tenuous.
 

Groom Lake attended Jack Kerouac's funeral and wrote a well-known article about it for Rolling Stone.  He has lived in Munich, San Francisco, New York, Buenos Aires, Paris, Charlottesville and Cleveland, worked in intelligence, and now resides not far from the Mexican border.  Groom Lake is a nom de blog. 
 

John McCreery is an anthropologist who has lived and worked in Japan since 1980. For thirteen of those years, he was a copywriter and creative director for Hakuhodo Incorporated, Japan's second largest advertising agency. In 1984, he and his wife and business partner Ruth McCreery founded The Word Works, a supplier of fine translation, copywriting, and consulting services to firms doing business in Japan.

McCreery is a lecturer in the Graduate Program in Comparative Culture at Sophia University in Tokyo, teaching seminars on "The Making and Meaning of Advertising" and "Marketing in Japan." His academic credentials include a B.A. in Philosophy (Michigan State University, 1966), a Ph.D. in Anthropology (Cornell University, 1973), and Japanese Consumer Behavior: From Worker Bees to Wary Shoppers (University of Hawaii Press, 2000).

On the political front, McCreery is currently International Vice Chair of Democrats Abroad, the Democratic Party state committee representing Democrats living and working overseas.
 

Josh Hammond is, among other things, a public policy analyst, business and social policy researcher, author, lecturer, film producer, public service ad executive, petanque player and sometime fly-fisherman. That's easier than explaining that he worked in the Nixon and Carter White House Executive Offices and did time in Sacramento working for Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown. He specializes in idea marketing, having created the "Just Say No" to drugs campaign popularlized by Nancy Reagan and helping popularize the wellness movement back in the 70s with the creation of California's "Friends Can Be Good Medicine" campaign.

Together with Jerry Bowles he put the national quality movement on the map with a Congressional Resolution and Presidential Proclamations by Reagan and Bush, the elder (not necessarily the wiser), the longest-running B2B campaign in business history, running from 1985 to 1997, when quality became a "commodity" and American corporations where rightly looking for other competitive advantages to survive.

Josh is author of The Stuff Americans Are Made Of (Macmillan, 1996) and co-author with Jerry Bowles on Beyond Quality (G.P. Putman, 1991 and Berkeley Business Books, 1992).