If the formative years of one’s life have a huge influence on how one turns out, as some experts in childhood development suggest, then a brief examination of my early years may explain a few things about my worldview.

My parents were people of the Great Depression, having started their young life together in 1934, during tough times.  They had no car and lived in a small rental house—along with a Mexican tenant—near the railroad tracks in my father’s hometown, close to where my father worked. My mother fed hobos off the back porch until the traffic got too heavy; their house had been “marked.” She recalls these tramps in their big black coats, hungry for food, and remembers seeing the campfires by the tracks at night. These were desperate times for my parents, but their lives were whole. They had decided to be happy. They eventually acquired a Ford, and with my older sister, moved to a highly mortgaged country home in my mother’s hometown, a small Northeastern Ohio farming community of about 200 people—that is, if one were to count the farms within a three or four mile radius. Our town had a general store, a one-room schoolhouse built in 1810, a post office, and a Presbyterian church built in 1851. The schoolhouse, where my older sister attended, was eventually closed and converted to a larger post office during my time there. Both the church and post office still stand, the church being an active part of the local community to this day. I was born in 1942 and spent my first ten years in that little village, built on the old stagecoach route to the West.

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