Below: Our family after my tour in Japan. The year is 1969. Back Row (left to right): my three brothers and me. Herb, Clayte, Myself, Joe. Front Row: Mom, Clayte’s new bride Mary Lou and my sister Sally.

I grew up on a 128-acre dairy farm at the foot of the Blue Mountains in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania. My parents affiliated with a very conservative Mennonite community. The rhythm of the farm (milkings, planting and harvesting) and the discipline of the Mennonites (revival meetings, plain clothes and conscientious objection to war) fenced our life. But daily life was rich—our farm was overrun with cows and rabbits and chickens. We spent holidays with wonderful cousins and aunts and grandparents.

I hated farm work and resolved early on it wasn’t for me. I spent a great deal of my boyhood escaping into novels when I was supposed to be cultivating the corn. Early on I felt a thirst for the Larger World. I scribbled out my first stories when I was ten and took them to family reunions, where I read them aloud to my cousins. They asked for more!

In Japan, where I landed after college (Eastern Mennonite), I lived with the Yamaguchi Family and became fluent in Japanese. However, Japan was a parenthesis, I thought, irrelevant to becoming a famous writer, like the literary giants we’d studies in college: Dostoevsky, William Faulkner . . . .I returned to the U.S. in time to participate in the Mennonite Renaissance of the Seventies. Mennonites were overthrowing the rule of the conservative bishops and indulging in the arts. I saw my first movie at 22. Merle Good’s Dutch Family Festival ran plays on Mennonite themes. Tens of thousands of tourists were descending on Lancaster County every summer and paying good money ‘to see the Amish’ – I wrote my first historical novel, Mennonite Soldier.

When the Mennonite Publishing House rejected my second novel as ‘vulgar and anti-Mennonite’, I was stunned. I fled to San Francisco with my new California wife.

San Francisco was my first American city. I had lived in three Japanese cities, including Tokyo, the world’s largest city in the 1970’s. But nothing prepared me for the raw discrimination that Harry Chuck, my first employer in San Francisco, was introducing me to. How was it our U.S. history texts never mentioned the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred any new Chinese immigrants from 1875 to 1943? Or of the murderous mobs who chased Chinese off goldrush claims and lynched dozens of them?

The City would painfully change my world view. The ‘things that break the heart of God’ aren’t things that happen for no reason. Prejudicial attitudes of white San Franciscans had created the ghetto of Chinatown over a seventy-five-year period. Racism and injustice clashed with the ideals of God’s Kingdom that I subscribed to. If we lived in this city, I was going to have to take sides, politically.

After a few years I became a recruiter and purchased TKO Personnel. The irrelevant Japanese experience? In mid-Eighties Silicon Valley, Japanese language was very valuable! I made recruiting engineers who spoke an Asian language my company’s niche market. And that’s a beautiful segue to my new book, Mayflower People (draft title—publishers reserve the right to give you the title they believe will sell best!). It’s the book I was born to write—the stories of twenty immigrants I came to know personally, people whose lives have changed mine!