The author's parents came to the United States from Mexico in 1948 as immigrants. After acquiring their green cards and passports, the family moved to Harlingen, Texas, until the early sixties. The family grew to six boys and one girl by the early sixties. They became migrant workers and moved to west Texas in 1963. The family would eventually settle in the Lubbock, Texas, area-more specifically, New Deal, Texas. New Deal is just about seven miles north of Lubbock. The kids attended New Deal ISD, where they all graduated from high school, except for the oldest son, who joined the US Marines in 1968 to go fight in Vietnam. Joe Gonzalez, the author, graduated from high school in 1969 and continued his education by attending Texas Tech University until getting married in 1972. He is a very strong and devout Catholic and believes in its teachings. As a youngster, he worked selling popcorn inside a theater and worked the fields, pulling and picking cotton or hoeing weeds. Later on, he worked as a butcher, a warehouseman, a truck driver, and finally, as a police officer for Lubbock Police Department, where he eventually retired from in 2008. As an officer, he was a street cop, a field training officer, an accident investigator, a crime scene officer, and a member of the Mobile Field Force for LPD. Many of his rookies are now sergeants, lieutenants, and captains at LPD. The author married his high school sweetheart, Orelia Gonzalez, nicknamed Cookie, in 1972. She was also a police officer in her profession. She worked for the Texas Tech University Police Department for twenty-six years before retiring in 2006. From there, she went to work for the Lubbock Preston Smith International Airport Police Department, where she currently still works. "But not for long," she says. They weren't able to have children, but they both have plenty of family members on both sides of the family to last a lifetime. The author's dad passed away in September 2015. He always wanted all his kids to have a good education in order to succeed in life. His mom is now in her early nineties and living "one day at a time."