Wilson Byers, Lori

The author was born in northern Ohio in 1938 in a ten-children Mennonite family, and joined the US Navy when he was eighteen. He grew up in the country and spent early years laboring on farms. He worked as a brick-mason, machinist apprentice, and after Navy schools, worked on shipboard radar and fire-control systems, traveling throughout the Pacific, spending three and one half years on the USS Prairie, an American Navy destroyer tender. After the Navy, Gordon Martin received an engineering degree from DeVry University in 1972. His wife and he spent fourteen months in Tunisia on Hospital Ship