So that's the man. He turns 71 today. He was born in 1935, for those of you short on math, in an industrial part of Germany in a town called Wanne-Eickel. Bad time to be German, to be sure. His father, who my father never got to know, was a coal miner and died shortly after my father was born. His mother was a seemstress and did a pretty good job at it from what I've heard through the years. She was able to keep herself and my father going through the war by sewing and making a living off the black market. She was especially adept at cutting cigarettes and reselling them. When the Americans really started their assualt on Germany during the war, obviously the industrial areas were the first areas to come under attack. So my grandmother threw my father onto the top of a coal train and they lit out of there not knowing where they would end up. They landed in a tiny farming village called Konigsheim. The war basically missed this little spot and my dad and grandmother rode the war out. The downside is that there wasn't a lot of seemstress work or black market to operate in such a tiny area. She continued to sew for the local farmers wives and often worked for eggs and milk. Poor is not the word, but the small community took them in and they made it through. My father tells stories of scouring the countryside looking for anything to eat. He became pretty adept at living off the land, but he'll tell you that he was fairly hungry for the better part of his youth. It's hard to fathom. Through it all, my grandmother stressed the importance of education, and my father went along. After the war was over, they moved back to Wanne-Eickel, where my dad continued his education. For motivation, he worked in the very coal mines that took his father's life. As he toiled, other miners would tell him stories of his father and how he died trying to rescue other miners in an unstable part of the mine. To fail in school in Germany is a one way ticket back into the coal mines, and my father hated the idea of working underground. Somewhere around 1951 or '52, my dad earned a scholarship to come and study in high school in the United States. Eager for the opportunity, he jumped on a ship to New York, and then got on a train to Green Bay, Wisconsin. He was taken in by a very generous family that made him feel welcome almost immediately. After his year was up, he returned to Germany to complete his high school education and started his college education at the University of Marburg. Upon the invitation from the same family in Green Bay, my father returned to the United States about 1954 and went to school at the University of Lawrence in Appleton, Wisconsin. He met my mother, who was from Chicago. He spent two years at Lawrence where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree. Back to Germany to finish his college degree over there and eventually to marry my mother who returned with him. About this time, his mother passed away after a short battle with cancer. At the age of twenty three, he was all alone. Luckily, he had my mother and they remain close to this day. They returned to the US for good in 1961 where they produced the first of four boys that they would have from 1961 through 1972. We lived in places like Chicago, where my dad worked at the Bank of Chicago and earned his MBA at night school. Toledo, Ohio where my dad worked at the Toledo Scale and played an intrumental role in the development of the scales that are used at most deli counters today. Grand Rapids, Michigan where he began his insurance career and finally, Danville, California, where he started his own business in the insurance industry. Today he enjoys sailing, fishing and hanging out at his recently built home at Sea Ranch. He rides his bike next to daily and still works very hard. To think that he had every excuse in the book to become something less than what he is, my father never chose to cop out. He came to this country with a $5 bill and a pair of underware in his back pocket, and he has carved out an amazing life. I asked him once why he ever left Germany. He simply said that he felt his best opportunity for success was somewhere other than war torn Germany. Given everything that he has achieved, I'd say he probably could have succeeded anywhere under any circumstance.

Makes you think about how fortunate we all are to have the power to create anything we want for ourselves.

Johnny GoFast