Herman Thorbecke

The following is the short version of my biography. A rolling stone….Satirical observations on aging

Born (1935) and bred in The Netherlands (Holland for short) I lived there, innocently and totally unsuspecting, for 23 years. Unsuspecting of the ups and down I would live through and to this day continue to survive. Just barely.
After obtaining a degree in agricultural sciences I felt an itch and became convinced that the grass on the other side of the fence would be infinitely greener.

The stone that had been motionless started to roll, all the way to South Africa, where it stayed for eleven years. By then I had more than enough of Apartheid and found myself a cushy job in Switzerland. The rolling stone rolled to Basel, where it stayed for another eleven years, during which I traveled on business to practically all corners of the world; 38 different countries on five continents.
That did include the USA where I fell in love with Florida and decided to accept a job-offer from a fledgling boat builder in St Petersburg, at that time known as the geriatric capital of the world. I suppose that’s why I stayed there for thirty years and got old, although not nearly as old as I am now. We arrived in Florida during 1980 and a couple years later the interest rates rose to 18%. Nobody in his right mind bought anything on credit and certainly not sailboats.

At 48 years old I was out of a job for the first time in my working life. My wife, Leah, being the more innovative and enterprising of us, decided to open her own private school. I was appointed as the school administrator, had not enough to do and made up my mind to become a real estate mogul. Not very talented in the area of rent collection I ended up as a real estate light-weight. Wrote a book about it, titled “How to Fail as a Slumlord. ” It’s available at Amazon and most of my readers find the stories fairly hilarious.
Florida is hot and humid and after all those years we rolled all the way to Lake Erie, where we lived on the lake one lovely summer and one horrifying winter. Eight feet of snow was more than we could handle and we decided to keep rolling until we found the perfect spot.

The rolling stone rolled South and after some time looking at houses in four states found our “final resting place” in North-East Georgia, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, on the shore of the Chattahoochee River.
While still in Florida, my wife and I started writing. She, children’s books and I, memoirs and short stories. Between us and partly together we wrote four books for children, aged four to ten years, and five short story compilations and memoirs, two of which in Dutch, my native language.

There will be a separate pages for each book and a page with short reviews of all seven books.

Please check out our children’s books here

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