Chapter 7: a father’s legacy
“That’s my Daddy. He’s eccentric as hell, but he’s a good guy.”
John about himself, 1987
As empty as John may have left Mary Esther’s emotional “need bucket,” he was consistent and overflowing with love for his four children. This love affair was infectious between and among the kids and their father throughout his life, with the development of a sibling-solidarity that continues to the present day. While their reverence for him as a father is clearly revealed in their stories and remembrances of him, his admiration for them was recorded in the first of numerous home videos that he made as oral histories.1
In 1987, he was recuperating from a stroke and still feeling a little shaky due to trouble with his blood pressure at 170/110. Sitting in Mimmy’s rocking chair, which had been refinished and re-caned and now ensconced in his buttercup yellow den, John said he thought he might “stroke out,” so he wanted to leave his children some special thoughts he had about each of them. He started by saying, “You won’t get to see this until I’m dead, but don’t worry about it. Everybody’s going to die. You need to think about what a wonderful trip I had with a job that allowed me to come home and spend time with you, which is what I wanted to do more than anything in the world. I don’t know how anybody could have had a better trip.”
He wanted to tell them how much joy they had given him. “You have my genes and a lot of the way you think is because you’ve been around me,” said John. “It gives me a sense of pride to think I had anything to do with the way you lovely people turned out. You accept responsibility; you’re kind; I think you are wonderful and I’m so proud of you.”
Then John starts naming specifics: “We had so much fun together. Selby, you had a red parka. There was the time when you were about 10 and we were skiing at Aspen and I wanted to ski the barrel with you—Spar Gulch—but you were really fast. I kept yelling your name but you didn’t stop.” When they reached the bottom, John asked her why she was skiing so fast and she said, “Because I have to go to the bathroom!”2 He remembered their golfing and fishing times in Florida and how Selby kept putting water on the fish on the towel in the backseat of the car. And he said he was sorry that she didn’t get to be a “big green Indian.” That was because the family moved to Norman during Selby’s ninth grade year and that meant she didn’t get to attend the area high school that included Ft. Walton. The school’s mascot was the Choctawhatchee Indians.
He told Johnny that as the eldest he had made the family “go”; that he had never told his Daddy a lie and, “I don’t know how you did that. You always came around first and told me what you did.” He added, “Johnny, you were so proud of Brucie, even though he could do things you couldn’t do and you never put him down.” John laughed out loud as he joked about the idea that Johnny had inherited his “love” for studying. “I hated studying so bad and I watched your agony in undergraduate school,” he said, “and I remember you didn’t want to do the work in a course that was going to get you into medical school.” Then he said, “I understood; man, ohhh, I understood.” But, Johnny studied hard enough. “Grandma was here the day the envelope came with the letter saying you had been admitted to medical school. I cried like a baby and grandma cried with me.” Even though Johnny had hated to study in medical school, he had hung in there. “You’re a real fine doctor. We both had a difficult time getting there, but think of the tens of thousands that didn’t graduate. My number one son graduated from medical school. All I did was graduate from West Point.”
To Selby Ann, he said on one of the early tapes that “she’s got it made.” She had been published in the American Journal of Cardiology and was doing her rotation as a pharmacy intern at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. (She decided later to switch to medical school.) In another video, Selby was sitting in her father’s lap as they retold a story to the family about their trip to Africa’s Serengeti National Park and an airplane mishap.3
They were in Kenya and their small plane had crashed at full throttle off the runway. John said he was sure the Lord looked down and said, “Stay that hand ’cause this man’s going to write me a physics book!” They saw zebra-stripped vans coming toward them from the end of the runway and the pilot came out from the cockpit. John told him to “get your butt back in the front.” Another passenger was also a pilot and John and he checked out the plane before it taxied back onto the runway to take off again. When he reported the incident as a case of incompetence of the pilot, he said the people in charge just laughed at him. Selby, smiling at her father’s rendition of the event, said they did get to their destination eventually.
John was proud of Sarah’s pharmacy degree and said she was a lot like him because she had taken six years, a longer time, to get her degree. A great frustration for him, he said, was the time after the divorce from Mary Esther when he couldn’t be with Sarah every morning when she woke up. “I wanted to be with you, Sarah, and I am heartbroken about those years we missed being together.” Now, years after the divorce when Sarah was 10 years old, John still felt the pain of that daily separation he’d experienced from his youngest child. “We took that lovely trip to Hot Springs and we got to go to England and Scotland, but that didn’t make up for all the time I didn’t get to see you.”
Then there was a message to Bruce, his third child. “You have been the easiest to get along with, Brucie, with the best nature.” He expressed deep concern that Bruce was doubting himself in some areas of his life. John said, “God loves you, just as you are. You don’t have to do anything special; you are totally sufficient for Johnny and Selby and Sarah to have you as a brother.” His pride in Bruce’s also becoming a physician was shared as he continued to talk about the relationships he observed among his children..
John told his children he decided to make this first video tape because he had been at the golf course that afternoon and gotten really tired. He remembered that when Mimmy died, he hadn’t told her how much he had enjoyed his own children. He said, at that time he didn’t “have the guts to do that.” Then he added, “Don’t ya’ll feel bad about not saying anything to me. I know you have said it to me hundreds of times by your words, deeds, and actions. That makes me feel so wonderful that you could be proud of me. I know you say, ‘That’s my Daddy. He’s eccentric as hell, but he’s a good guy.’” He concluded, “Having your approval means a lot to me. I know I embarrass people sometimes. Approval from those I hold in high esteem is important to me though.”
Ask his children their most memorable characteristics of John Saxon as a father and a wealth of stories comes forth. For Johnny, who can quickly tear up when asked to recall memories of his father, it was his dad’s unconditional love. “That has remained with me as a father myself today,” he said. “When I was 19, I quit college and decided to be a ski bum in Colorado for two years. I knew I could always come home.”
Selby said her father didn’t put his foot down on anything once they got out of high school. He always said, “My job is to prepare you to do anything you want to in the world. Until you leave my house at 18, you’ll do what you’re told.” Further, he said, “Don’t tell me what you want. You don’t know what you want because you’re not old enough now to make those decisions. You don’t know what life holds for you as an adult and you don’t know what you’ll need. You’ll take three years of foreign language [in high school], all the math and sciences offered, and the history and literature courses. My job is to prepare you for life. I don’t care if you work at Target when you graduate and leave my house, if that’s what makes you happy. If you choose to do other things, you’ll be able to do so because I did my job as a father.”4
Although Johnny had thought he would follow in his father’s footsteps and join the military, that decision was derailed when he was 10 years old and had to start wearing eye glasses. When Bruce was in the fourth grade, he also was fitted with glasses. Until those events, both boys had seen fighter pilots and military men as their role models. Now, their father pointed out the important roles of their two uncles who were physicians. He explained how they were respected, helped people in a meaningful way, and would always be able to put bread on the table because doctors would always be needed.5
Johnny’s college friends thought his dad was “the coolest guy” because he was always so interested in them and what they were doing. He always wanted to know what their plans were and what they were doing to meet them. As a student at the University of Oklahoma, Johnny would bring his friends to the house on Sundays because the college cafeteria was closed. Anytime a newcomer was in the group, he would have to explain that the “price of admission” to his house was listening to his father for the first 15 minutes as he explained how he was going to save mathematics education. It reached the point that his friends looked forward to coming to see “The Boss,” who was always working at the dining room table. They had also discovered that since John was writing his math books, he had to create all the word problems himself and that meant he was using Johnny’s friends’ names in those problems: Bob Moxley, Don Deason, and Bobby Zwann, among others. “To this day, my friends remember the problems and page numbers involving their names.”
When he was younger, John coached Little League football, so when he was 52 years old, he would play pool and touch football with Johnny and his friends. “Of course, he didn’t move for three days after playing football,” laughed Johnny. He said his competitive father believed that understanding the principles and value of competition was important. When Johnny had his Dad come to his home in Muskogee (Oklahoma), they would play golf with various friends. John always wanted to play for five cents “a side.” At the end of 18 holes, if anyone owed John money, he insisted on being paid in exact change. “If he were owed 10 cents,” recalled Johnny, “he wouldn’t accept a quarter. The loser had to pay the exact change.”
Johnny said it wasn’t about the wager; his dad just believed a person would play twice as hard not to lose five cents as he would not to lose five dollars, especially if he were required to pay in exact change. “So it was the lessons of the competition that were important,” his son said. John clearly appreciated his winnings, as reflected in a collection of nickels that were displayed on the mantle over his fireplace. When visitors asked the meaning of this “collection,” John would say, “I won those from my son.”
“My father was a Renaissance man,” said Johnny, as he thought about how to find just the right description of his father. “His passions included ancient history, great literature, and great poetry.” Johnny remembered when John, who was fluent in French, talked the French consulate in Houston into donating 30 copies of Impressionist art to Oscar Rose Community College, where he was teaching. He wanted that art to hang in the hallways of the buildings, Johnny said, because the students would be exposed to art “all around them.” John later donated $250,000 to OU to fund a professor’s chair in ancient history. Yet his father had a command presence of a military leader in a room, said his son, “and no one had to get a group quiet for him to start talking.”
Being very impressed with writer William F. Buckley, Jr.’s vocabulary, John, in his fifties, picked up a dictionary and started with the letter “a.” He went through that book, making countless personal notebooks of words—in those stenographer notebooks—where he would have the word on one side and the definition and roots on the other so he could “flip and memorize.” John was fascinated with words and language. His extended vocabulary was used in his math books and written articles and would, strangely enough, cause anxious students and readers to complain about the use of words they didn’t understand. John’s suggestion to them? Look up the words and learn about them. In fact, before his death, it was his goal to write books on teaching vocabulary and English, while using methods he had honed in his mathematics textbooks.
Remembering one such proposed English lesson on vocabulary, Selby said, “Here’s an example that he taught me that I’ve never forgotten: There are these four words-- propensity, proclivity, penchant, and predilection. Those all mean to be inclined toward or have a leaning toward something. He had one word picture for those four words. It’s a man leaning over the top of a cliff [proclivity], with two pens in one hand [propensity and penchant] and an ice cream cone in the other. The word predilection was for licking the ice cream cone. Then, you just have to learn the nuances of how to use the words, Daddy said. His word book would allow you to bring together four or five words immediately that meant the same thing. He had a strong, strong command of the English language.”
As far as his father’s later success as a publisher of mathematics textbooks, Johnny stated, “Everybody’s financial rewards in his company were a byproduct of ‘doing the right thing.’ Johnny called the first 12 sales people with the company its “disciples.” There was no money for computers or desks or expenses. “If anyone needed a secretary, it was up to that person to find one and pay her.” All the sales representatives had been math teachers and had used Saxon math textbooks and they were real “believers.” Their job was simply to help continue John’s mission of changing math education in America. “It wasn’t about making money.” The financial results that had come to consultants and those working with Saxon Publishers were beyond their imagination, said Johnny, because their mission had remained, from the beginning, to sell the “Saxon program” which had to be, by necessity, incorporated into math books.6
This appreciation of good writing with rich words was a lifelong habit according to his children. The first two books he gave Selby to read the summer after her fifth grade year were To Kill a Mockingbird and Gone with the Wind. He talked about the characters in those books like they lived next door, she said, and “that made me just want to know about them. I couldn’t put down those books.” When John discovered Books on Tape, he reached new heights, she said. He listened to them while driving and, while he loved that opportunity, those who rode with him didn’t because his hearing was bad and “he played them at full volume!” When she cleaned out his car after he died, he had finished listening to a medieval history by William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire, and was halfway through another tape.
Not to be stalled for a moment looking for glasses he might need for reading, John had about 30 pairs of reading glasses around the house, car, and office, said Selby. All of them were in some state of disrepair, frequently held together by a safety pin where the arm had fallen off.7 “When you walked by his desk, he would frequently be sitting there writing with one pair on his nose, one pair on his head, one pair tucked in the collar of his shirt and a pair on the table. And they were always smudged.”
For Selby, “It was just fun to be with him all the time—with his spontaneity and what he called his ‘adventuring’.” He wanted them to learn everything. They went ice skating and skiing and horseback riding as kids. If a lesson were available, they took it. He would say, “I don’t have much money so I can’t buy you things, but I’m buying you lessons because lessons can’t be taken away from you.” That even included sewing lessons. John wouldn’t give her money to buy clothes but he would give her all the money he could for her to make them. At the same time, he was quick to let them pursue things they liked that he felt would “better” them, whether it was guitar lessons, travel, or sports activities. She said nothing put him off or made him reticent to attempt anything different and that included meeting people. “The back side of that was sometimes he didn’t seem to have boundaries—at least as my mom saw it.”
Reviewing what were apparently special Air Force Academy days, Selby told how her dad would come home and say, “Let’s get in the car. We’re going adventuring!” They wouldn’t know where they were going. Sometimes they ended up on the obstacle course behind the Academy in the hills. “Go! Go!” he’d be shouting. “Climb over that log! Go up that wall!” It was a blast for the kids. “We might just go to town. It didn’t matter where it was, but it was to be an adventure,” she said. Mary Esther was rarely with John and the kids during such experiences that involved outdoor and athletic-type events. To be fair, at least while they were at the Air Force Academy and enjoying winter activities, she was staying at home with Sarah, who was born in 1963, their first year at the Academy.
It is important also to remember the order of birth and ages among the four children when looking at such adventuring activities. In 1965, for example, while John was in his second year of teaching at the Academy, Johnny was 12 years old; Selby was 11; Bruce, 7; and Sarah, 2. That meant Johnny, Selby, and Bruce were more involved with their father’s individual and “group” teaching for several years before Sarah’s possible inclusion.
Both Selby and Bruce mentioned that when they went skiing, they wore multiple pairs of their flannel pajamas as long underwear and they ate out of the trunk of their car instead of “up on the mountain” because it was more affordable. They ate peanut butter sandwiches and hot dogs while other kids had lunch inside. “Yet,” said Selby, “even with my wooden skis and second-hand boots and being 11 years old, I was on the racing team.” They went to “swap sales” on Labor Day (for those boots and other equipment) and skied in sweaters and hats their grandmother made. Selby wore her brother’s hand-me-down parkas. “We didn’t look slick, but we could ski better than most anyone out there and that had a lot to do with my dad’s attitude about enjoying things-- that it wasn’t about possessions or what you had, but what you were capable of doing.”
John had said, “I want you to learn to play tennis so when you grow up and move away and someone needs a fourth person to play tennis, you can do that. It opens doors--learning of things when you’re young takes away the timidity of learning things when you’re older.” He told them, “You don’t spend your life watching other people doing things and saying, ‘Boy, I wish I could do that.’ You just get up and do it.” When having to “describe experiences, events or persons that have been important to you in your development” in her application for admission to medical school, Selby had written about how the adventuring led by her father had helped develop her academic successes and personal philosophies about achievement. “From the time I was young, fat and freckled, my father told me I was pretty, smart, and I could do anything I wanted with my life. I listened and I believed him,” she wrote. “In subtle ways, he taught me not to fear what I did not know.” To Selby, that was one of the great qualities of her father.
She wrote about the day after she received her driver’s license and he asked her to go into the “city” to run some errands for him. She said she didn’t know the way, having never been there, and told him she wasn’t going. He said, “Be back by four.” There was the end of her senior year in high school when he decided she needed to go to Europe for the summer. Again, she told him she didn’t want to go since she didn’t know her way around Europe and couldn’t speak the languages. He responded, “Your plane leaves two weeks from today. We’ll see you in August.”
Bruce’s memories mirror those of Johnny and Selby about childhood adventures. It’s what he began seeing as a teenager that adds to this picture of their father. Like Johnny, Bruce’s friends loved John as he encouraged them to succeed and was “always asking them questions.” Bruce said his father’s love of teaching was reflected in his engagement with students, especially as he told them about his own struggles with mathematics and how he had arrived at a method that worked and from which students could truly learn the “hard” subject of math. His dad truly believed what he was saying, said Bruce, when he told everyone, “I’ve got the answer to math education.”
When John started writing his first math curriculum for use at Oscar Rose Junior College in Midwest City, Bruce was still in high school. “The book came at the right time in his life,” he said. His parents’ marriage had ended in divorce in 1977, one year after his father had published his first work as a stapled paperback for his college students. This work was later published in 1978 by Prentice-Hall as a college textbook. They all thought, “Wow, Dad’s going to have a book published.” Bruce isn’t sure to this day how his father got Prentice-Hall to publish that book, but he said as young people they didn’t fully understand the significance of what their father was doing.
While Johnny, Selby, and Bruce were all in college by 1978, Sarah was still in high school and living with Mary Esther. John’s empty house was to become filled with his passion for producing a first year algebra textbook for high school students, but Bruce said that while his father became consumed with his writing, he always managed to remain engaged with his children’s lives. For example, there is a home video tape in which Bruce is showing John photographs from Bruce’s trip to England. The visits included sites related to the Beatles, an important singing group to Bruce at the time. His father listened closely to the site descriptions and some songs’ histories as Bruce described everything in detail. The total absorption of John in Bruce’s personal interest in the Beatles was clearly apparent as he sat quietly and looked at each photo Bruce handed him and listened to his son’s enthusiastic comments about the trip.
Sarah had the benefit of learning her father’s values and philosophy and the relationships of her siblings during her first 13 years, but she had a more limited time during her high school years with him after her parents’ divorce. Living with her mother meant she simply wasn’t able to be around her father everyday. While this was a huge emotional strain and frustration for John, Sarah said that neither of her parents ever spoke against the other one.
“Both Mom and Dad wanted all of us to be comfortable in our own skins,” she said, “and to be our own person.” That’s why Daddy insisted that we all earn a college degree. He said, “I don’t care if you ever use it, but you need to have a degree.” It was important to him that we all had a “separate life” from him and that included one from his publishing company. He therefore “never put an onus on us to run the company someday.”
Sarah learned early about “Auntiebelle,” her father’s aunt in Georgia who had devoted 53 years of her life to teaching and making sure, as a young woman, that any of her brothers or sisters who wanted to attend college got that opportunity, including John’s father. This followed his method of teaching by example, as also explained by Selby. “Daddy was a life-long learner,” said Sarah. “What people don’t know is that he wasn’t about ‘just math’.” She said his goal was to turn around education and that he would go to anyone to spread his message. When asked about his textbooks becoming more popular in smaller school districts and with home schooling parents, and if these were the markets that should be his primary targets, Sarah responded that her father wanted to get his message to as many people as possible and therefore did not consider the idea of focusing his sales toward any one area or group.
“When he was ignored or criticized by Oklahoma educators, I told him about the Biblical verse from Luke that a prophet is not accepted in his own land.” She said when people ignored him, that didn’t stop her father. At the same time, Sarah admitted that John would sometimes react to things he thought were a silly waste of time, or at least were things he didn’t understand the need for, and this could come back on him. This attitude would be reminiscent of his college days when he would blow off studying because he often saw it as “playing the game,” which he refused to do. Now, as a publisher, John was making those same kinds of decisions on occasion. For example, he would sign CPA records for credit card expenses as Joe Blow, Joe Namath, or Daffy Duck—anything silly that came to mind. She said the auditors did come back with some of those statements and with questions that John had to answer.
Criticisms were often laid on John for his physical movements while talking, remembered Sarah. “There was one DVD that he made and his hands were flying all over the place. That’s why you’ll see him on later DVDs holding his hands together in front of him when he talks.” John remained an animated person, however, in more casual or personal settings. He often rubbed the top of his head or pulled on the skin of his neck while talking during the video tapings of his personal history. Because his right hand had been broken in the 1953 airplane crash, he had crooked fingers and use of those bent fingers were noticeable as he held forth with expressive hand gestures about his programs to any listener. There were times, such as in Dallas, Texas, and Boise, Idaho, that he climbed up on a table and talked to groups from that vantage point. This caused some people to think he was indeed a little more than “eccentric.” The habit of climbing onto tables to get a better vantage point had been one he adopted while teaching at Oscar Rose, according to Selby. With students at all three blackboards in the room, John could see them all as they worked by standing on the table.
Sarah said perhaps partly because of her father’s strong belief in service to others, Auntiebelle’s historical influence on the family, and the desire to have a solid educational foundation for their own children, she and Bruce established a private Christian school in Tulsa, where they both live. The Saxon mathematics curriculum is used at the school. When Sarah picked up her oldest daughter from her first day in the 7th grade, she asked her what math book they would be using. Her daughter said, and then showed her, “the orange one.” Sarah said she cried at the sight of “the orange one,” which is the Algebra I book and the first one her dad had published with his own money in 1981.
Besides teaching the intrinsic values of “doing right, working hard, taking care of others, and accepting people for who they are, right where they are,” John always celebrated life’s victories, no matter whose victories they were according to Selby, and he passed on that joy of feeling good about special events in everyday life.
He loved Monty Python, the comedian who used coconut halves to make the sound of horses’ hooves in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. John had two coconut halves in the house that he kept on the front bookcase. “One of the silly but fun things we would do was run a victory lap around the house – clapping the coconuts together – when anyone had something to celebrate. Daddy always made a big deal out of the right things.”
He had several favorite poems including If by Rudyard Kipling, which he read to the children “numerous” times. Another favorite poem was by Robert Frost, The Road Less Traveled. He had that one memorized. In fact, while he was sitting in a friend’s car in August 1996, two months before his death in October, John found a scratch piece of paper and wrote the poem from memory. That written paper is now framed and hanging in Selby’s home. She said, “This poem is his life story. He would always say, ‘Go the other way. Go the way people haven’t gone. That’s the adventure.’”
A favored teaching technique was his use of analogies or examples. He would tell of a neighbor, friend, or someone in the news who had done something well or not so well—who had made a choice—and John would let that be the teaching point rather than pointing his finger at his children and saying, “You need to do this or don’t do that!’”
Selby recalled there was an actress who years ago left her husband and children in the United States to go to Europe to be with another man. John had great disdain for that action. “How can anyone be so selfish?” he asked. She said his desire for his children to be able to open any door did not mean that trumped the needs of others. “We weren’t allowed to abdicate responsibilities in the pursuit of self.” It didn’t matter what you had, he would say. It was your attitude that kept you from enjoying life, not your position in society. “He was adamant about that,” said Selby.
She freely admits there was no question that she and her father are like-minded personality wise, more so than the other children. But their father-daughter connection was an intentional one that developed from his special attention to her so that she was not treated differently from her brothers. “He wanted me to be feminine and lady-like, but if my brothers had to do something, I did it, too,” she said. She remembers one day when he spent about two hours teaching her to pitch and to hit a baseball so she could hold her own with the boys. When she got her first car, she had to learn to change the oil. She had to mow the lawn and if the boys went skiing or horseback riding, she did, too. “He saw all those skills out there as being just as essential for me as for my brothers.”
Remembering her father’s words about Air Force wives being left with no resources after the death of a husband or through divorce, Selby said he thought it was wrong for women not to have professions or a means to secure their families financially. He saw it as a failure of expectations for women that wasn’t being met and told her, “I never want you in the position of not being able to put bread on the table. I never want you to be in a position not to enjoy something because someone says you are a woman.”
John was therefore very deliberate that Selby and Sarah never be victimized in that sense. The bar was just as high for the girls as anyone else, and for Selby, “That was wonderful. I was very confident and I learned to be fearless. I learned not to be afraid to try things, to move around, and to meet people. He was never patronizing or condescending. He had great expectations for my enjoyment in life and the things I could achieve.”
Some might conclude that John Saxon was “pro-feminist,” but they would be wrong. It wasn’t equality that motivated John to push girls toward independence; it was the chance for an opportunity that motivated him, said Selby. “He clearly understood the roles of men and women, as he saw them, in the culture.”
He maintained his view of material possessions being a small one in his life, even as his millionaire status grew. He frequently told interviewers and students that he had bought himself a Mercedes and a gold watch and would then say, “What more do I need?” Selby said when she was little, her dad would say to them, “Now when my ship comes in, I’m going to get you a new parka,” or some other item like that. She asked her daddy what that meant. “That’s just an expression,” he would say, “for when people hit it big and make lots of money—they hit the big time.” She said he would then laugh and say, “But we’ve already hit the big time.” The fact that he ultimately did hit the “big time,” she said, and that his ship had come in was always such a joke to him. “It wasn’t ever anything he would have strived for,” said Selby. “He was never motivated by the desire to get rich or be known. He was always motivated to do the right thing. The consequence of always doing the right thing and pursuing the common good resulted in his hitting it big and becoming well known.”
As a father, John’s legacy may be as simple as making sure that his children knew he loved them. “I always knew it,” said Selby. “He verbally told me that all that time. He said his dad never did that for him. His dad belittled him so he was not going to make the same mistake with us.”
That legacy of love, taught to the Saxon children as they were growing up and even throughout adulthood, is echoed today when Johnny says, “I am proud to say after 20 years in business together, my siblings and I are still fast friends and maintain family bonds. We regularly vacation together as families.” It would appear that John had been a master teacher.
Chapter Seven (Part one) - John Saxon's Story read by Niki Hayes and Jenny Hatch #JohnSaxonsStory