Obituary:

 June 20, 2001

Louie Y.T Liu was a 21 year resident of Federal Way, he died June 20, 2001 peacefully in his sleep.  He was born October 30, 1924 in Ningpo, China.  He came to the United States in September 1948 to attend Oregon State University to study Pulp and Paper chemistry.  There he met his future wife, Sang Wong Liu in a Chemistry Class.

He is survived by his wife and four children Gloria Liu, Daniel Liu and Patty McKenna who live in LA, and David Liu, who lives in Chicago.  He has eight grandchildren and four surviving brothers who live in China.<BR>

He was employed for 30 years by Weyerhaeuser Company as a chemical engineer. He completed degrees in Veterinary Science,  Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, as well as an MBA.  In the Chemical Engineering Society he was elected to Fellow.  In January 1980 he moved to Federal Way.<BR> 

Throughout his life he gave time and boundless energy to the Jr. Chamber of Commerce for which he was elected Key Man of the Year, founding the Seamans Center, and being a Boy Scout leader.  He was very involved with his family, helping each of his boys to achieve the rank of Eagle Scout.  His daughters were both National Merit Finalists and Weyerhaeuser Scholarship recipients.  All of his family shared their fathers value of education and earned at least one Masters degree.

After his retirement in 1982 he was active in the Community Caregiving Network, Job Center, and Habitat for Humanity, Rotary Club and Kiwanis.

He was active at Steel Lake Presbyterian Church as a choir member, deacon and elder.

LOUIE Y.T. LIUS STORY (as told in October 1998)

My grandfather lived in a big house along the Sun Yan Gi River in the village of Sun Hay, outside of Ningbo. The courtyard was about 25 feet by 25 feet. There was a big brick wall around the compound, about 8 feet tall. At the top of the wall over the four gates were tile roofs so people wouldnt get wet while waiting at the gate. Across each gate was a big bolt, which was locked by a padlock. My grandparents had the keys and locked it up at night.

The family home in Ningbo was along the riverside. One side faced the river, along the other three sides were rooms. Two of the rooms were for the business. In the other rooms were the family quarters and the living room. My grandfathers sons and their families lived there, except for the ones who had gone to Shanghai to make their fortunes. About 15 people lived there all together at one time.

The family business was making paper for ancestor worship (shibo). There were about 10-12 employees, mostly older women and a few men. The men would pound the gold until it was very thin, making gold gilt. They would buy inexpensive paper and pound the gold into a thin film on the surface. The women would fold the paper into the shape of gold bullion. People would buy the paper and burn it, thereby sending money to their dead ancestors. When there wasnt any gold they used lead.

I was born in Ningbo on October 30, 1924.

Early Years

Our family had a wet nurse who nursed my older brother and older sister. We called her Yu Yo Am. She was from the Yu Yo village. Am means mother. She ran out of milk by my turn, so we hired another one for a year to nurse me. The first nurse was very faithful and lived in our house for nearly 60 years from 1923 to 1980. The communists sent her home because people were not allowed to have servants, but she didnt want to go home. Her son ended up being the mayor of their village Yu Yo, west of Ningbo.

One summer, when I was little, I went to her village. Her son was a farmer. He raised sugar cane. We would break the stems and eat it. My mother said you should go with the servant and brush off your grandfathers headstone. The cemetery is in Dah Bon Say (Dah Bon Mountain, in Ningbo, Cheng Jan Province). Dah Bon Say has a monk. Our familys infant mortality was so high I was the 13^th child born, even though I am the 2^nd oldest now. Many of the others died, only 7 lived to be adults. The monk said if you want to keep the babies alive, you should mark their heads like a cow, by taking a hot coin and pressing it to the back of their head. The devil would see that the babies were marked and belong to a family, and then would not take them. So from my older brother on down, the monk marked us all and after that the children lived.

Yu Yo Ams son said we could go and catch cicadas (big grasshoppers) from the sugar cane field. It was fun to catch them and play with them. I tried to tie a string to one, but the string was too heavy so he couldnt fly.

When I was only 5 or 6 I went to visit another cemetery on Memorial Day. Our job was to visit it and clean the headstones. I had to travel all alone from the town to my house and I had no flashlight. I was told that if you looked back over your shoulder, the light from your shoulder (which scares away devils) would be put out, so you should never look back over your shoulder. I was very careful not to look back. This is because we believed that if you were a righteous person, you had a glowing light from your shoulders. If you got scared, your light would be gone and ghosts would get you.

I remember when I was little, during an earthquake one day, Yu Yo Am was washing my feet in warm water before I went to bed. When she felt the earthquake she thought God was punishing her because she must have done something evil. She was frightened by the sound of the falling tiles and thought God was telling her not to do any more evil things.

Another favorite memory was when we were in our village, we spend our money on firecrackers, especially those which shot upwards, like rockets. We made a fort and shot firecrackers toward other kids forts. It was like we were two nations having a war. This game of launching fireworks at each other was so fun, but the firecrackers cost money, so we tried to earn money to buy more. My father wanted to reward us for catching fish. He offered us a dollar for catching one fish. One day I caught a small one and I got a dollar so my cousins and I could buy more firecrackers.

I remember one of my happiest memories in the village of Ningbo was to go to the market with my father and buy flowers. It was a special time. Also I remember the village teacher, who lived in our compound. He would carry me on his back to school on rainy days so my shoes wouldnt get wet. But I didnt attend school full time in Ningbo. I was too young.

The village school was Buddhist and I went there for my first classes, when I was 5 or 6 years old. At this small school they didnt have a first grade class, so I had to jump into third grade. But they didnt explain things to me very well and all the kids were older, so I didnt understand why certain characters sounded certain ways or represented certain words, and it didnt make any sense to me. Besides there were no textbooks. They just told me I had to remember it. I would try to copy the characters from the blackboard onto my paper but I didnt understand the complicated ones and fell way behind. It wasnt until later when I got to Shanghai that I started to go to first grade again and learned the nursery rhyme  ba ba ma ma go go di di which finally helped me begin to understand.

The village school compound was in the temple. There were lots of Buddhas there. Our ancestor altars were there. Our aunts and uncles would tell us who some of the dead relatives wereuncle this and aunty that, but we didnt care much because we didnt know them. The ancestors names were painted on wood plaques.

I only vaguely remember my grandmother, she was pretty healthy. She lived with fourth uncle and every year at the Memorial Day celebration we would come down and see her. She moved to Shanghai when we closed down the gold paper bullion business. My grandfather died when I was quite young.

Life in Shanghai

In 1932 my family moved to Shanghai, when I was 8 years old. We lived in a mud house that only had a dirt floor. There were only two room and I didnt like it. The only good memory I had of that house was once when my mother made jello. When it was all eaten, I scraped the bottom of the bowl. My mother saw that I liked it, so she made me more the next day and I was so full.

My mother was a very honest woman. Many merchants would try to cheat people by using false weights on their scales, but my mother would always try to be fair by bringing her own true weights to use.

I started attending my second school in Shanghai in 1932. It was a Moslem school, but they didnt require us to be Moslem, just attend school. There was no religious instruction. Since it was a bigger school, I could restart first grade, so I was 8 years old in first grade. Because of the war, life wasnt normal and everyone moved around and didnt always do things in order.

Later on we moved to a place close to the elementary school. If it rained we rode in a rickshaw. If it was good weather, I walked to save my money.

In 1938 I started at my third school, which was Grace Christian School. I was in the 6^th grade. The Sino-Japanese War had broken out, so that was why we had to change schools. We were afraid the Moslem school would be occupied by the Japanese, so we moved to the French sector of Shanghai (the French were neutral). There were French, English and Japanese sectors in Shanghai. The British and Chinese were fighting in 1938 and I remember the Japanese attacking and everyone crying. There was lots of bombing in the city, first by the Japanese and later by the Americans. Every night we turned off all the lights so the planes couldnt see us.

In 1942 I finished 10^th grade and went from there to college. They told me the rest of high school was just repetition, so I wanted to go to college. But I needed a high school diploma to enter college, so a friend of mine forged me a diploma from the shutdown high school in his village. He had stolen some seals and certificates that had been left after they closed down the school. I paid him about $15 and my younger brother did the same thing. He would have graduated from Pu Tong, but he lacked a few credits. I bought him a diploma from the same school.

Life at the University

In 1942 I was 22 years old and I enrolled at the Nantung College to study veterinarian medicine. In my junior year we had a good devoted teacher who taught us anatomy and physiology. The president wanted to discharge that teacher to save on salary costs and this made us upset. The holy ghost told me all the reasons why we should retain that teacher. I thought about this all night and in the morning went to talk to the principal and told him that he shouldnt discharge our good professor. I told him that I didnt care if I was expelled or not. Later the school board discharged the principal. In my class was the son of the school board chairman and he supported me. Later on an animal husbandry professor took over the principalship.

During the summer of 1943, I was 19 and I caught tuberculosis. It was such a severe case that I had to lay and rest all the time at home. My grandmother spent a lot of money to hire a nurse to spoon feed me day and night. The only time I got out of bed was when I went to a clinic for treatments in a pneumo-throax machine. This machine pumped air into the cavity around my left lung to collapse it so it wouldnt have to work. Eventually I recovered by the end of the summer and could return to school. But during those months of resting I picked up the Bible I had from grade school and read it every day. I had bought this Bible for one dollar and had never really read it. But now I treasure it so much. I still have that Bible. That summer Reverend Fong from the Memorial Methodist church visited me and my mother often. He would stop by for lunch on his way back from the country and talk to us. Later on we learned that the Japanese put him in a concentration camp and he suffered greatly because they thought he was a leader of the resistance.

I remember a story that happened to me when I was about 22 and had to cross the bridge to go through the British district. The bridge was called Hooku Bridge and its still there today. That day I wanted to see my professor who was sick. On the bridge was a sentry and everyone said you had to salute the sentries, or they could kill you. I intentionally did not salute the Japanese soldier but looked at him. He called out Halt and made me stand still for 15 minutes. I was scared to death. Finally he said Yooshu and I finally got to go. That was one of the reasons I joined the underground to fight the Japanese.

When I was in college I was part of the resistance. One of my jobs was to distribute the anti-Japanese newspapers. But if I got caught, Id be thrown in jail or killed. So I borrowed the best bicycle I could find (from my cousin) and would load newspapers on the bike, then throw a pile down on the street corner and ride away as fast as I could.

In 1946 when the Japanese were close to losing the war, I was part of the graffiti gang. Very early in the morning we would go around to the walls and paint; A+B+C=V This was symbolic of Americans + British + Chinese = Victory. This was the only way that the Japanese would be pushed out, if we all banded together.

I also remember organizing a choir while in college, so we could get people together to sing. I always loved to sing and I helped organized field trips to the country to visit animal farms and bee farms. One time when we went to the country we were stranded, there was no train to take us back to the city. One boy told me to ask the train conductor, but everyone was afraid of him because he was Japanese. But I went up to him and explained our plight and he flagged down a freight train so we could all ride back to the city. He was a kind Japanese man.

I graduated from Nantung college in 1946 with a degree in animal husbandry. I did well in my studies so I was chosen to be assigned to work for the National Bureau of Animal Husbandry. It was one of the best assignments that anyone got.

After graduation I took a short 2 week job to survey all the electrical power generating stations in Taiwan. This was a fun job because I got to travel a lot. I visited my first uncle, who had already left Shanghai with all his assets and set up a business in Taiwan.

I worked for the government for about 3 years. During that time I met a famous doctor from the United Nations, who was also giving vaccinations to cows in the country to prevent anthrax. We had to give shots to all the cows in their rumps. Also I inspected meat at the packing plants. I remember one time I was coming home from a job in the country and didnt have a ride home, so I saw some soldiers riding in a truck and asked for a ride. They let me on, but when I got close to my home, they wouldnt slow down, so I jumped off and fell down and broke my front tooth.

Relatives

When my grandfathers sons were old enough, they went into the city to serve apprenticeships. The first son (Chong Shou) established an import/export business. He would buy paper and sell it. The second son (Chong She) established another business. I remember that this uncle was so short that when he went to the city for his interviews, grandma made him some platform shoes so he would look bigger and older. During family gatherings my grandfather would gather the children around including my father and give lectures to pass down ways to do business.

The third son was my father (Chung Yung) and he went into the army. He had to go on the Long March and afterwards he had varicose veins in his legs and they hurt a lot.

The fourth son, (Chong Hsi) first had a paper distribution company, then later decided to build a papermill, The Great China Paper Company in Shanghai. He would test the water everyday and find out if the tides brought fresh water or seawater. My cousins Ven The and Ven Hwa, were children of my fathers first sister. They started as assistants and eventually worked as personnel managers. My fourth uncle was the plant manager.

Going to America

After working for 3 years I got accepted to a US college. I asked my 4^th uncle for a loan because in order to get a visa I needed to show that I had $2000. My uncle said: Heres $2000, but you must pay it back after you return after college. Go to America and get a college degree. (I had been accepted at Michigan State in the Veterinarian Medicine Program). I was very lucky to get a visa because the national government was trying to send as many young people overseas as possible to protect them.

In preparation for leaving, I stayed for 3 months with Mrs. Ho in Nanjing and she taught me a little English.

While I was there I learned that Michigan State had changed their minds. I had been bumped out of the class by returning GIs, so I had to act quickly to get accepted somewhere else. I immediately tried to apply to other US colleges. I applied to colleges on the West coast because they were more practical and had programs for pulp and paper technology. Luckily, I got accepted to Oregon State University in Corvallis and I bought a 2^nd class ticket to America. A 2^nd class ticket would get me more respect on the ship than a 3^rd class ticket. My ship stopped in Guam on the way to San Francisco.

In September of 1948 I landed in San Francisco. I kissed the ground when I arrived. A friend I had made on the ship invited me to ride with him with another friend to Long Beach, California. I was rudely educated to the facts of life by losing a lot of money tossing rings at the carnival at the Pike in Long Beach, to try to win prizes. I had wished I could call the police because I felt that my money had been stolen. But it was really a good lesson for me on how easy it was to lose money.

I bought a watermelon for 5 cents and rode on a bus to Corvallis, Oregon. The bus was filled with GIs but I didnt know anyone.

Life at OSU

When I arrived at Corvallis I enrolled as a graduate student because the courses were cheaper, but I took undergrad courses, because I needed to learn the basics. I studied hard and it was very difficult because I didnt have the foundations and I couldnt speak English very well. My roommate, Clarence, brought me to his home at Christmas and I accidentally fired a gun at his house because I didnt know it was loaded. Luckily no one was hurt. We worked together in the kitchen and he would occasionally steal silverware from the tables. I told him not to do that and he stopped. I got a part time job washing dishes. During my freshman year I didnt know many people.

During the summer of 1949 I met your Mom in an organic chemistry class. There were only about 9 students in the class since it was summer school. Your Mom was short and had trouble setting up her glassware for the experiments. I stopped by her desk and helped her fill her burette. I said: May I help you? and eventually we studied together and went to movies together. Eventually we double dated with Moms roommate. We fell in love and went on canoe rides in Everett Park.  We also made trips to the Oregon coast for steamed Crab and walks on the beach.

In 1949 when I was working at a Chinese restaurant in Portland, they started calling me Louie. I liked the nickname and kept it.

During 1950 I worked in a boarding house to pay for my room and board. Mom came to eat there often and we could talk. Since I worked there, I only had to pay ten dollars a month to sleep and eat there. I also worked in a cannery and dug ditches.  I often told you boys that you should get a college education so that you would not have to dig ditches for a living.

I ended up going to school for 4 years to get my BS in Chemistry, but since I had already taken enough courses in Chemical Engineering, I later enrolled and got my second degree. In 1950 I spent $650 on a car to impress Mom. It was a black Desoto and we went for a lot of drives.  When I wrote Mom about the car, I mistakenly called it a fire engine and Mom didnt understand it in my letter until she saw it. I was still trying to master my English.

In 1951 I drove Mom to Kansas to enroll her in her doctoral program in Foods and Nutrition. Afterwards I drove on to Appleton, Wisconsin to see the Pulp and Paper Institute. I tried to enroll as a student and was willing to take any kind of work, but since I had no introduction, no one would talk to me. I wanted to be closer to your Mom, but still pursue the papermaking business. On the way there I had a terrible problem with my car and I blew out all 4 tires. When I got to the school I found a professor with a Chinese name and I explained my sad story. I asked him to loan me $50 to buy tires and since he was a countryman, he helped me. When I got home I worked hard and sent the money back. Many years later this professor wrote me a letter asking me to help him find a job at Weyerhaeuser, and I tried to find him a position.

In 1952 I graduated and got a job at Weyerhaeuser. The summer before I had worked digging ditches and then I got my first job as a shift chemist in Springfield, Oregon. I called Mom and asked her to come home so we could get married. We did get married in December of 1951, but she had to return to Kansas to finish her semester. A few months later I called her and asked her to come back to Oregon because I had been in a bad accident in the pulp mill. I had burned my hand, so she came to Springfield to take care of me.

At Weyerhauser I met my closest lifelong friend, Doug Taylor, who was also working as a shift chemist. During these days I worked at night as a shift chemist and then took graduate courses during the day. Shortly after Mom came to Springfield I got tuberculosis again. I ended up spending 13 months in the hospital. They gave me a lot of medications that had side effects and for a while I had to go to an institution because I got in a fight with a doctor. At this time also, Gloria was born and I wanted to go home to see my first child. Gloria had to stay with a teacher when Mom went to visit me in Salem. It was hard for Mom to learn to drive because she was so short.

I finally got well and returned to work. My boss, Oliver Morgan, had saved my job for me while I was sick. He was a very kind boss. Later I got promoted to be an analytical chemist, which was a day job.

In 1954 Mom and I bought the E street house in Springfield for $50 and the mortgage was $65/month. We had the old freezer on the back porch to store food and we still have that freezer today. David was born while we lived here. Recently Daniel went back to Springfield and saw the home is still green and looks the same. Doug Taylor and I carpooled and he could always find our house by the big white freezer on the back porch. This was the beginning of a life long friendship with Doug Taylor and he became my best friend. His family lived on N Street and  we shared many good times together over the years, including traveling to Shanghai where I grew up and Hymore, South Dakota where he grew up, both times with my closest cousin Bonnie who lives in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

In 1956 we bought the Quinault Street house for 2 months of back mortgage payments. We built a tree house in the big willow tree in the back yard with a trap door and screen windows from an old trailer. We put drier felt from the papermill on the floor and David and his friends could sleep overnight up there. We had a rope swing under the tree and a big garden. Our neighbors were Charles and Bernice Smith (the high school principal) and Dick and Gail VanZanten. Ethyl and Gus Renwick lived across the street. Daniel was born while we lived here.

In 1957 I received a letter from my cousin saying that my mother had died. The letter had taken months to get to me because it had to be smuggled out by a priest through Hong Kong. When I read the letter I felt very lonely and cried for three days. After that I tried to teach my children Chinese, but they werent interested. I got my permanent resident status in 1958 and I was very grateful. A special bill had to be passed in Congress to convert our student visas to green cards so we could apply for citizenship. Mom and I were really happy when this happened because it meant that the life we had built wouldnt be taken away from us. Up until that time we were always in fear of being deported and separated. In 1963 I became a naturalized citizen and I was selected as the outstanding naturalized citizen in Oregon that year and went to Salem to receive an award from the governor.

I was very active in the Jaycees and worked at the Broiler Festival for 5 years, I ran the Miss Slick Chick beauty contest for little girls. We lived close to Wilamette Lane Park and built the little triangle park near the bridge. I was awarded the Jaycees key man award in 1958, but had to retire when I turned 35 years old (by club policy) because I was exhausted . Then I started to work in the Boy Scouts with my son David.

Working at Weyerhaeuser had its pros and cons. One benefit was that it was a stable job with some nice people. I occasionally got reject materials for home projects, such as the lumber we used to build the tree house on Quinault street, or the drier felt for the garage floor, or the rolls of Kraft paper. But it had its draw backs too. The work was often stressful, especially if there was a machine breakdown and we had to get the plant back up and running. When I was in production, I would occasionally get called out in the middle of the night to help fix a problem. Also my clothes and shoes would get a sulfur smell from working in the recovery section of the Camyr mill. The loud machinery also damaged my hearing.

In 1965 we built the Pleasant street house and Sig Auto, a visiting German engineer, who was at Weyerhaeuser for training, helped build the fish pond. We had 5 men help build the pond and the concrete forms gave way and the sides collapsed. This house we built the way we wanted. We built the roof with pointed cedar shingles to copy a Chinese temple and we had stepping stones with the Korean alphabet to go to the pond from the house. Mom had selected translucent butterfly panels to be installed near the hallway by the front door and we made a chessboard and shuffle board in the cement in the backyard. We built the fence ourselves and built a sun deck and poured the concrete for the fence posts.  Jack Loy was our neighbor and they had a lot of Young Life meetings in their basement next door.

We attended Ebbert Memorial Church and I sang in the choir. I was also responsible for the audio visual equipment in the Sunday School and I was on the church board. Patty was born while we lived there. Our family was busy with the Boy Scouts and church and I went on a lot of Boy Scout campouts with David. David got his Eagle scout award from troop 179. We made a lot of friends who are still friends today. I led a Mens exercise class at Willamette Lane pool three mornings a week. I worked hard to stay healthy because I didnt want a relapse of my tuberculosis. We had a lot of potlucks in the fellowship hall and Reverend Ross Knotts was our pastor. I remember we had a Bible triva contest about the book of Matthew and Gloria won because she remembered that John the Baptist ate locusts and wild honey. When our Pleasant street house was done we had all the choir members over to dedicate it to God.

It was also at the Pleasant street house that I got my ulcer. I had driven to Corvallis for a chemical engineering meeting with a friend and we had stopped after the meeting at a professors house. I had severe stomach pain and it was so bad that they took me to the hospital. They thought it was appendicitis and did exploratory surgery. They removed my appendix, but discovered that the problem was really an ulcer on my duodenum. Doug Taylor drove mom to Corvallis and I was in the hospital for a week. I think this was related to work stress and after that I tried to exercise more regularly.

I had a big garden in the back yard and also one across the street. I wrote to the Burpee seed company and got special hybrid corn that grew very tall in the garden across the street.

In 1968 I was transferred to the research division in Longview, Washington. I thought that research would be better because it was too hard to advance in the production department. We bought the Hawthorne street house and Gloria finished her last year of high school at RA Long High School. She went away to school at Caltech in Pasadena, CA.  I was also involved in the church choir, the Seamans center, the Rotary and the boy scouts. Daniel  got his eagle scout award there. He was 15 years old and Lucky Laidlaw was the scoutmaster. I was assistant scout master of troop 514. We were very active in the Longview Community Church and we attended Dr Irwins 2 year bible study and the Basic Youth Conflicts seminar.  When we first arrived in Longview Dr Warren was the pastor, but I had a spiritual renewal when I attended Basic Youth Conflicts and Dr Irwins Bethel Bible study. I was also heavily involved in the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and was elected secretary of the Forest Products Division.  I was awarded the distiction of Fellow in AICHe in 1982.

It was while we lived in Longview that I started the Seamans Center. We had a little storefront where sailors could come any play pool when they were on shore leave. We had several bicycles they could ride to get from the docks to the center. We painted them bright yellow so no one would steal them, but theft was always a problem and we had to replace them often. Mom helped a lot by providing translation for several seamen who were sick. One Japanese sailor even got shot and the hospital called Mom in the middle of the night to come and translate for him. Several captains were very nice to us and invited us onto their ships for banquets. Mom even met one Korean captain who had graduated with her brother in the merchant marines before he was shot in Korea. I remember having a fund raiser where we made a Chinese dinner. It was so popular that we ran out of food and had to go to the store to get more.

In 1974 our Buick Special blew out its transmission. Daniel had been playing around at tennis practice. So I took a week off of work to rebuild the transmission myself, even though I had never done it. I just bought a shop manual and followed the directions. When I put it back together I had a bucket of parts left over and was really worried. But the car ran fine.

In January of 1980 I was transferred to the research center in Federal Way. I retired from Weyerhauser in 1982 and then started my real estate and consulting career. I also got my MBA from City College and continued to be involved in the Rotarians. On the day we moved into our house in Federal Way it was so snowy that the moving van couldnt make it up the hill. The movers had to unload the truck at the bottom of the hill and load it into a small truck so it could be driven up to the house.

In 1980 I started the Community Care Giving Network. It all started with the community suppers, which we had at Steel Lake Presbyterian Church. Pastor Lyle Starky had suggested that I take on this project and he supported me all the way through. The suppers grew and we often had 75 homeless people come for dinner. Next we started the Emergency Assistance center, which provided short term housing and food to stranded people. Next I started the Job center to help people find jobs. Much of this work was partially supported by county funding, but we were routinely short on funds and had to do lots of fund raisers. Later I started a chapter of Habitat for Humanity and we build several houses. I later dropped out of the Rotarians and joined the Kiwanis.

Now I am retired and spend all my time doing Gods work. I thank God for how good he has been to me and our family all these years.

 Advice

I have lots of stories to tell you, but the most important is to love each other as Jesus commanded us. My father and mother wanted us to teach all of our children this, but they werent well educated. They had us read lots of fiction books on religion and I didnt know these were wrong until I found the Bible. This was when I was sick with tuberculosis at age 19. This is the Good News. It stirred a hunger for God in me and made me want to see the Christian country America, which I love.