James Brooks Kinzer

This biography traces the rise of a man and his family from its roots in hard-scrabble Pennsylvania, to an upper middle class existance in the Chicago suburbs. Kinzer's family were subsistence farmers; Kinzer himself aspired to be a math teacher at the local high school. But opportunities opened up for him after his service in the Army Air Corps during WWII. He took advantage of the GI Bill to earn a law degree; after graduation, he launched a long, successful career as a patent attorney.

The narrative is taken largely from Kinzer's own memoirs, transcribed and edited by his daughter Margaret Kinzer Meyers. Margaret's sister, Janet Kinzer, pared down the text and added a wealth of information about her father's forebears--a motley of religious dissenters that immigrated from various points in western Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. They include veterans of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, and both World Wars.