Begin at Once to Live

About the Book

BEGIN AT ONCE TO LIVE tells the life of Joe Thatcher.  Thatcher’s story begins on a farm in Ohio with all its trials and tribulations.  Its milking cows to eating apples before a blazing log fire.  The next sixty years of his life are revealed in a tapestry of experiences set  against the great backdrops of our greatest century.  World War One, the Roaring Twenties.  the Stock Market Crash of ‘29', the Great Depression, World War II and on into the sixties.

Few people alive today can truly say they shook hands with the great Babe Ruth, conversed with Gertrude Stein or boasted of having survived Guadalcanal and a firing squad at the hands of Nazi captors.  And few can tell such a story without embellishment.  Thatcher leads on his odyssey while carrying a burning torch for his true love.  Does he ever find her?

     Loaded with life and spirit BEGIN AT ONCE TO LIVE is the true account of  much observed by the author.  We see, not an average man decorated in war, but a man living to the fullest, and through him we see his family and friends.

    After the last century came to a close BEGIN AT ONCE TO LIVE gives us a fine chronicle to reflect on this, the greatest of all centuries.  Jim Reay living it wrote many notes about it and through Joe Thatcher, we can too.

About the Author

Jim Reay, an average American male, in the middle of a successful career, dropped it all and moved to Mexico to play tennis, and write from notes he had taken over many years. After twenty years he returned to San Francisco where he hangs out at Roma’s and the Bueno Vista in North Beach.