In the beginning
I have never written my story. I have told pieces of it from time to time, or as a short introduction in a class I am teaching, but I have never taken time to write some of the details, painful or happy, of my life. This is really the story of how Adult Life Training, Inc. came to be, because ALTi grew out of me and my life experiences. Life is full of choices, and choices bring consequences. This is the story of how my makeup and the consequences of my choices made Adult Life Training, Inc. what it is today.
A long time ago
My father’s side of my family came from a guy named George Soule. George was an original signer of the Mayflower Compact and that family line (Paul and Marie Nash) eventually settled in South Bend, Indiana. Both my grandparents Nash died in 1980.
My mother’s side of the family are Cokers (William David and Ella Gayhart Coker), which are Gayharts (William D, and America C. Peck Gayhart from Texas). Both my grandparents Coker died in the 1960’s. The story I was told is that my ancestor in Texas was widowed during the Civil War and when she saw armed men coming down the road to her property she understood that her husband must have been killed in the war (the names of the dead were posted in town) and the men were coming to kill her and take their property, as they lived on valuable property. She fled with her three children, only one of which survived their flight, settled in Kentucky, and eventually the family line moved north to Winslow, Indiana.
Most of my memories of childhood are just my immediate family and the Irish Roman Catholic neighborhood in which I grew up. I never really knew the people on my father’s side of the family because they didn’t associate with us much, and I had little interaction with those on my mother’s side because of the distance. My childhood was good enough: I remember having a chemistry set that actually contained chemicals, an erector set to build things, the “Visible V-8” my dad got for me to build. Dad was a mechanic: mom was a secretary and later in life a nurse.
Most of my time I spent by myself doing things – I preferred to be alone building something. When I was old enough Mom got me into a Cub Scout troop, and then WEBELOS, and then when I was old enough (I think 12) I could be a real Boy Scout. And that changed my life.
The most important things I learned about Organizational Management I learned from the adults in Scouting
My time in Cub Scouts is mostly gone from my memory – my mom taking me to Cub Scout meetings – I remember WEBELOS a little. WEBELOS is an acronym for the Cub Scout ranks Wolf, Bear, Lion, then Scout. Mr. Jack Hill (we were taught to respect adults: he was always MR. Hill) taught us rope skills, knots, and some other things. I see his son, Larry, on FaceBook from time to time. I still have the rope he gave me, with the ends that I neatly whipped under his instruction. The rope is a little hardened now, but still very serviceable. We used it to learn knots, and always carried it with us on our belt even later as a Boy Scout.
The biggest impact Scouting had on my life was not from the skills I learned, or merit badges I earned, or even my Eagle rank – it was the way the adults all worked together as a committee. I had briefly been in other Scout troops but they were always lead by one man who was the Boss – his decisions were law because it was his troop. Troop 433 was different: it was lead by Bob Fuller, Don Gudates, Jack Hill, Gerry Wallis, Don Riddle, Arlan Huff, and others but there was no one man who gave all the orders. These men were from very different backgrounds in very different jobs – welder, electrician, radar tech specialist, rough carpenter, business owners – and they all worked together bringing their skills and experiences to help us boys learn and grow up to be responsible adult men. None of them ever argued to have their own way, they discussed how to do things and then they all did what they decided together. Troop 433 started small but quickly had several dozen Scouts. We met one evening every week in the Coquillard Elementary School cafeteria, worked on Scout skills in every meeting, went camping (rain, shine, flood, or tornado) once every month, and even trained up all year one year hiking a mile every week or so carrying a twenty pound backpack so that we could handle two weeks hiking in the mountains (carrying everything on our backs) at Philmont Scout Ranch in Cimarron New Mexico.
Due to the dedicated and cooperative effort these men poured into us, Troop 433 was no ordinary scout troop. We mastered every skill, won every contest, I feel that we were the best troop in Tri Valley Council. I remember one winter contest event with troops from all over our region how I learned it is not good enough to be the absolute best unless you also care about how your success impacts others.
Each troop built “Klondike Derby” sleds (think Iditarod – each patrol in a troop had built its own sled). One scout rode the back of the sled, one scout rode covered in a blanket in the sled, and the rest of the patrol pulled the sled from station to station where we were challenged with skills tests – first aid, cooking, fire building, knots, map and compass, and lots more. After all the troops had finished we gathered around a huge pot hanging over a campfire and got a big bowl of hot soup to warm us up.
Our leaders called our troop aside where the other scouts wouldn’t hear and from the look on their faces we could all see something serious had happened. We had won every single contest, every skill. But, they explained, the Klondike Derby judges could not award us the honors we had earned because the other troops would have nothing. We were told the judges decided that the awards should be shared, and that our leaders had agreed to this decision, not because it was fair to us, but because it was in the true spirit of Scouting to be kind to the other boys. To our credit we all went along with it. Troop 433 really was the best Boy Scout troop ever and the lessons I learned in that troop helped shape my management philosophy.
I finished my Eagle Project and earned the Eagle Rank in my Senior Year in High School. You were required to do a significant project in those days to qualify as an Eagle Scout: merit badges and book learning was only part of it you had to actually DO something that impacted the community around you. Working with my Aunt Irene who was a teacher in the Gary, Indiana school system, I held a week long Summer Camp at her lake cottage for her class of oral deaf students. Camping in tents, boating, fishing, swimming, even a treasure hunt, and the kids had a great time. I can still finger spell (well, except for a couple letters I can never remember) today and sometimes even learn ASL signs. I guess I can sign more than most hearing persons, but I’m not remotely good enough to interpret.
Real Life
After High School I went on to Purdue in West Lafayette. My mother talked with High School guidance folks and learned of the grants and scholarships I could possibly earn: they would help but not pay for college. Then there was the Fred Bryant Eagle Scout scholarship – a full ride for four years. It was administrated by the National Bank downtown and only one was issued each year. To apply we were required to write a paper on what Scouting meant to us. Several boys applied but I was blessed to be the one who got it. That carried me through most of my four years at Purdue. 
I started out in Honors Physics, then pre-med, then with only two and a half years of scholarship left, I changed degree objective again into Electrical Engineering with a minor in Clinical (Medical) Engineering. I graduated Cum Laude in Electrical Engineering in 1977, in a mere 2.5 years for a four year curriculum (because I had to). I completed a Clinical Externship at Saint Joseph Hospital in South Bend to satisfy the last of my degree objectives, tried a year of Masters Study and dropped out because I was burned out, and I went into the industry. My first job was at a small controls company for a couple months, and then I went to Bendix Corporation to do Aerospace engine controls and test equipment for twelve years. At that point I was an optimistic single young man who lived with my mother – my father had been murdered and it was just us and my two younger brothers now.
When I started at Bendix they gave me a desk to sit at and some 3-ring binders. I was to read those binders to figure out what I was supposed to do. My first project was the memory board for an EH-L2 engine control – they couldn’t make it work as every time the memories were accessed they caused a huge current spike. After
some days of frustration I sat down and read the data sheet for the memory chips again. There was nothing in the written specs that showed anything should be wrong, but when I looked at the timing diagrams I saw one detail that was different. It was late at night, everyone else had gone home long ago, I had no workbench or tools with me, but I had my pen knife and some clip leads. I changed a couple things and … the current spikes vanished, the memory board worked, and I went home.
My assignment after the memory board grew into my job for the rest of my time at Bendix. The device was called the Communications Interface Adapter. It was an interface board we used to upload the engine computer’s program code, watch its computations, download its data, and even change the data its sensors were providing or the results of its computations into something we wanted it to be. The acronym was appropriate: the CPU never knew what was going on. All I will say is that when I started, the CIA cost about $60,000 each and we needed three new ones for every project: when I was done it cost $5,000 and one CIA could be reused on any project simply by changing a $150 personality module.
Ham Radio and Red Cross
One of the two friends I had during my early years was a farmer and the other was an electrical engineer who later became a corporate manager. Both were named Brian, although one was spelled Bryan. I learned a great deal from Bryan on his farm, and a great deal from Brian building model rockets, airplanes, and radios. We were active in Ham Radio due to my prior work on related merit badges in Scouts, and I held a Technician license for a long time (now I hold a General Class license W9NEG). 
We volunteered with the Ham Radio emergency service RACES to help provide communications at Notre Dame football games every home game, and that brought us more into contact with the Red Cross, where I was already a CPR Instructor and first aider. I probably got more excitement as a Ham than the Red Cross volunteers at games because I was just in the right place at the right time and when necessary they switched my job from HAM Communicator to ARC First Aider. I took one person with a heart attack to the hospital doing CPR all the way there; another person I found just laying on the ground unresponsive, breathing but with unequal pupils (if you have Red Cross first aid training you can guess what happened to him). Whenever the Red Cross needed more help in an emergency I could switch from being a Ham communicator to being a Red Cross volunteer, and you will see how that became important in some of my current decisions for Adult Life Training, Inc.
If it hadn’t been for my time volunteering with the Red Cross I likely would never have married. There was this very pretty girl a couple houses down from where I lived, and I had played with her brothers in my younger days, but I had absolutely no clue how to build a relationship or persuade a pretty young lady to give me the time of day. And then I hit it: the CPR class I was teaching had a bunch of people in it, and I needed another instructor: she was a student nurse and so probably already an expert in CPR. So I called and asked her if since she was a student nurse and I really needed someone to help with this particular CPR class I could impose on her. She agreed, I picked her up in my car before each class, and for the next several weeks she went crazy trying to figure out if she was on a date with a hot young well paid engineer or merely helping me teach a CPR class. After we finished the last class we sat in her father’s driveway, snow softly falling to cover my nice new car, and I asked her if I may kiss her. Then she knew. Forty-five years later I am blessed beyond words to have her with me today as my wife of forty-three years.
Life Happens
I was living the American Dream. Wife, kids, nice house. I completed my Master of Business Administration in June of 1990, taking night classes at Indiana University in South Bend. We had the things we all consider part of the American “normal” life.
We were active at our church, Calvary Chapel (in Mishawaka at that time, now in Granger) and our pastor had asked us to lead the Compassion services team. Our job was to assemble a week’s worth of food for families that called the church asking for help, and get the food to them. I built a set of shelves in our second 2.5 car garage and stocked it with non-perishable foodstuffs from a church food drive and our own contributions. We bought milk, bread, eggs, and other perishable items just before delivering the bags of food to the family in need. I stood one evening, in my 5,000 square foot house, at the top of the stairs with the terrazzo steps, maple hand rail, and eight foot diameter crystal chandelier, leaning against the light switch at the top of the stairs as I wept and prayed, asking God to help me better understand the poor so that I could better minister to them. Never do that. God hears what we ask and he rarely teaches by just explaining things: most of the time what you are going to get as the answer to your prayer is experience.
My job at Bendix ended two or three months later in the fall of 1990, the year my fourth child was born. I was in the wrong place at the right time and had knowledge of two separate events involving inappropriate treatment of women who were employees – in one case a cleaning lady had a maintenance man refuse to use another men’s room while she was cleaning (a walk of less than a minute) and he forced his way into the restroom and urinated in front of her. In the other case a draftsman was actually stalking an engineer who kept herself covered very modestly from chin to mid-calf and always behaved very professionally. My supervisor was deeply impressed by her but they kept their activity at work entirely professional. I was much too trusting that people would do the right thing: I reported both situations to a department manager that I trusted so that the company could correct the employees and protect itself from liability suits. To demonstrate their gratitude they fired me.
I had a wife and four kids to support, lots of credit cards, and a too big mortgage, with no emergency fund and no income. I had never learned the most fundamental financial skills and when my income unexpectedly dried up, we lost almost everything. That experience, and the financial skills I eventually learned, are the life experiences that drive me to try to prevent, prepare for, or respond to financial emergencies. I am driven to prevent or at least reduce human suffering from the kind of financial crisis that tormented and almost destroyed us.
Sink or Swim
By 1990 when my time at Bendix ended, I had a wife, four babies, and a three-story, 5,000 square foot home with three two and a half car garages, terrazzo floors, crystal chandeliers, a living room larger than the house I now live in, and a $650 mortgage payment with no income and no savings. The names of the bank and people who made us homeless are forever burned into my memory but I will not mention them here: I forgive them: may God forgive them. The important thing to know, so you understand why this mattered in what Adult Life Training, Inc. does today, is that I had no Emergency Fund, almost no investment, never budgeted with my wife since I was married – in short, when the word got out that I had reported inappropriate conduct no business in South Bend would hire me and my finances were a mess. By December I had even cashed out the little 401(k) from work just trying to keep my family sheltered and fed. The bank foreclosed on us. They said they weren’t – that they were ‘rolling the arrears into to a new loan so we wouldn’t lose our house’ – but they were suing us behind our backs all the time. When I was trying to sell the house the potential buyers would never give me anything more than the exact amount of the mortgage. Somehow they always knew my mortgage balance even before the legal process started. We couldn’t rent anywhere regardless of if we had the money in cash as the bank had ruined our credit rating. I now had a Master’s Degree in business administration, a track record of phenomenal success as an engineer, and no one would let me work for them.
There was only one path open for me. A friend of mine had been in farming his whole life and he knew how to start a business. I asked questions, got started, and I was able to rent office space in the Omniplex Business Center and opened a business helping small businesses with computers, computer programming, and a new thing – computer networks. This eventually lead to me being able to rent a nearby house from the man who owned the Omniplex and moving my family out of my mother’s basement. It was rough, for seven years it was rough. The neighborhood was rough. There were regular gunfights, drugs, and prostitution. The first week we were there someone died in the Dairy Queen parking lot when he tripped and cut himself on an axe he always carried – no one knew how bad he was hurt because he always wore a rain coat. We lived and breathed life in poverty and no matter what I did I couldn’t earn more money. God is thorough in teaching us lessons.
Eventually I got work as a Visiting Professor at Purdue on the South Bend campus teaching several classes a week and taking another professor’s classes as well when he quit in the middle of the year to go to another teaching assignment. That job ended and I went to probably the best company I have ever worked with, AgriStats in Fort Wayne. That lasted five years, and then they got a new manager in my department, and things changed. I ‘cost too much’ and he brought in programmers for much less than market rates from Mexico and China through H-1B visas to replace the American programmers who worked for market rates. I had still learned nothing about budgeting or having an emergency fund, although I had paid off all credit cards. But there were no relatives here to shelter us – we were alone except for each other and God.
When God Talks
This time at least I learned to file for unemployment and that helped initially a little. No health insurance. No money. And once again, no one would hire me as a conventional employee but I formed a for-profit company so I could work Business to Business and got a little work that way, and did some adjunct teaching for a local university. It was a little but not enough. That is when I began to do the steps that created Adult Life Training, Inc. I had done some pretty impressive things while at AgriStats, including converting their data processing stream from using a multi-line BBS for their customers to login and upload data, and the time consuming (read that expensive) customer support issues that went with it, into an automated Internet approach that they worked without need of our help, but still all doors seemed closed. As I thought about this and tried to understand what I could possibly do, I prayed, and this time God answered.
“Boy” he said, “you sure know a lot about computers.”
“I suppose I do”, I replied in my deep sadness “A lot of good it’s doing me.”
“Boy”, he continued. “A lot of people would like to know what you know.”
“I suppose they do. What can I do? Download it into their brain?” I was at my rope’s end. This was not helping.
“Where did you go for unemployment?”
“The WorkOne center on Rudisill”
“Don’t you think that’s where they go? Why don’t you give them a call.”
It was a statement, not a question. Conversation ended. That is the only time I remember ever having had an audible conversation with God. I’m glad he likes me.
So I called WorkOne. I had put together some material on spreadsheets and some Larry Burkett material on finances – stuff I could teach people. My pastor had some old computers in a closet that AEP had donated without an operating system, and offered me a room to use as a computer classroom. I assembled some of them into a computer lab. I had to use Linux because I had no money to buy Windows. Later I learned how to receive donations from Microsoft, but that is now and this was then. Linux and OpenOffice was the only free software so I had to learn how to use it. And learn I did.
When I called WorkOne I expected to get stonewalled and shut out. What actually happened is they connected me immediately to the Indiana DWD executive in charge of the northern half of the State. Meetings happened. Facility visits and inspections happened. My pastor had the church underwrite a lawyer’s services to create the foundational documents (Articles and ByLaws) that a public charity must have, and a former IRS auditor at my church helped me navigate the IRS approval process. A handful of saints agreed to be our first Board of Directors. Adult Life Training,Inc. became a legal entity, and about seven months later was recognized retro-actively as a 501(c)(3) tax exempt public charity effective as of February 2, 2004.
In blithe ignorance and desperate hope I started teaching basic computer skills, such as where is the “on” button and the “any key”, then basic spreadsheet use, to the people WorkOne sent to me in groups of about twelve.
No battle plan survives first contact
I had this all figured out: there were this many unemployed people in Fort Wayne, I could teach this many of them over this many weeks and in this number of weeks I’d have everyone employed. Well, yeah, you’re laughing if you know anything about business. Through helpful suggestions and feedback from the students, I wrote and re-wrote the books I used in class. Over time I developed several books with photos or screenshots in both Linux and Microsoft environments because many people don’t read well, especially those who do not speak English as a first language. It grew and God was blessing the work.
Eventually Adult Life Training, Inc. connected with the Federal Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP – pronounced “sea-sep”) where persons at least 55 years of age and certifiably very poor were placed at non-profit organizations to learn to work 20 hours a week at minimum wage (paid by the SCSEP program) in hopes they would be hired and paid something. Many churches and other non-profit organizations (NPOs) welcomed a free janitor but the participants “rode the program” for four years and never got an unsubsidized job. Normally an NPO would be allocated one SCSEP person and they would stay there until their time in the program ran out. After talks with the SCSEP program manager, Adult Life Training, Inc. was allocated six SCSEP participants. We used the computer curriculum I had developed over the years, and God blessed the work – we were very effective.
Most of my students came from families which had never had anyone hold a job longer than two weeks, if that. Poverty culture is different than working class culture, and the differences are important. As I worked with them it occurred to me there were several things holding them back from getting and keeping a real job that paid a living wage: computer skills, financial literacy, English literacy, and hard job skills (such as basic reading and math). I put together a program that addressed each area one day every week – Tuesday was computer day, Wednesday WINS hard skills day, Thursday money day, and Friday reading day. God blessed the work and the net result was that half of the people in each SCSEP group were getting and staying employed in real jobs (not minimum wage jobs) before or by three months in the program. This was considered phenomenal. We started a new SCSEP group every six months – those one or two people still not employed after five months were actually not willing to be employed, so they moved to another NPO where they could happily “ride the program” and those who got employed started having some real income and a better life. And they stayed employed.
In order to teach the Financial Literacy I needed curriculum. At first I worked it in using the Cash Flow project in the Spreadsheet module (computer classes learned by actually working on projects, not by being lectured), but later (around 2010) we learned of a curriculum sold by Ramsey Solutions called Financial Peace University. Most recently we have been buying a site license from Ramsey Solutions so we can offer FPU to anyone who wants to learn, for free. The cost has been underwritten by the 3Rivers Credit Union Foundation for fourteen years now.
My original vision, to assembly line train all unemployed people in Fort Wayne, was significantly off target, but we adapted, changed, responded to community needs to continuously improve and now we have a very respectable program with some volunteers coming in to help, each on their day. I was damaged badly by my financial mistakes and I had to learn how to talk with (not to, with) and plan with my wife about money, keep a financial safety net, and budget. We do this together now and our relationship changed: once I learned to talk together with her about the most sensitive topic, money, we could talk about other things and our relationship has greatly improved. My technical writing skills grew from Bendix over time so that I could write our curriculum. My experiences when young shaped my awareness of how important it is to have a diverse group of people who are united in purpose, and so even today I am a consensus seeker who prefers to work with a committee.
All these things were critical components of what makes our training at Adult Life Training eons ahead of anything the social services industry had ever seen before: someone with a college opinion is always at a disadvantage to someone with actual experience. The poverty we suffered taught me real skills to deal with my own poverty, which I shared with those in need, not with theoretical philosophies but with heartfelt empathy and understanding that focuses on realistic ways to help them where they are without judging – “it happened to me too, and I had two college degrees, you can do this! This is what worked for me and it will work for you.”
Where we are today
Today I am being treated for cancer. The doctors say that I will hopefully live a long life (in one doctor’s words “Until something else kills you”). The Abundant Life Church, which generously donates spaces for our program, is in the process of massive remodeling and upgrades to provide an ultra modern environment that brings families together. That project overlapped our computer lab space so Adult Life Training has only been doing FPU classes for the last two years (we currently do not have a place for our computer lab).
A friend of over twenty years accepted a management position in our local chapter of the American Red Cross and she had the idea of bringing Ham Radio operators into the Red Cross – something I experienced through RACES at our Notre Dame home games – so I began again to be active in our local Ham Radio clubs and started volunteering as a Disaster Action Team Specialist and a Disaster Duty Officer at our local Red Cross. I am gently feeling my way to see how we can incorporate Red Cross training, such as First Aid and CPR classes, into our community services at Adult Life Training, Inc.: the mental picture is still a bit blurry but taking shape. It’s all about community, preventing and alleviating human suffering, and holistically improving the lives of our community through training, mentor-ship, and example. It’s a good fit.
Where exactly this will place us I have learned it would be silly to guess. Will we restart computer classes? Continue FPU? Add new, different life skill classes? I don’t know. You can see how far off my original plan was. But of one thing I am certain: when it all settles we will have an ultra-modern teaching environment with its own coffee shop and comfortable, informal, seating where people from the community can come in any time, 24/7, and get a Cup ‘O Joe, settle into a comfortable love seat, and check their email as they sip their coffee and nibble away on their Danish. I see a shared room where multiple classes are happening. I even see people asking at the coffee counter and borrowing an iPad to use while they are here. We’ll have to wait and see how it all really takes shape. Whatever happens, I am confident that it will be better, and better serve our community, than anything we have ever had before.
So welcome to year 2025. Happy New Year. What an exciting time to be alive!
John D. Nash, Jr. CEO
Adult Life Training, Inc.
Your free membership to Ramsey Plus includes your member workbook and a free year of Financial Peace Membership, with online tools created to support your journey, underwritten by a generous grant from the 3Rivers Credit Union Foundation. 3Rivers is here for you: here for good! And by a grant from Fort Wayne Door, Inc. Fort Wayne Door is your complete garage door services center. And by a generous grant from Abundant Life Church. I’ll see you there, it’s a great place to be! There’s always something happening at A.L.C. And by grants from American Programmers Independent, LLC. When you want something done, call API. For more information see our Financial Literacy page at https://alt-fw.org/outreach/.
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