Stranger than Fiction!
INTRODUCTION
I was born the fourth of ten children and first son of Elza Lafayette Dement and Ruby Ila Bounds-Dement at 7:30 a.m. on 12 November 1928 in a tiny isolated valley known as Mayberry in the Ozark Hills of southeast Missouri, USA.
“Just in time to start for school!” my mother is said to have quipped.
Mayberry — which as of this writing has only one family — is about one-quarter to one-third of a mile wide and some four miles long. It was named after the first Anglo resident who arrived there in the early 1800s.
My father Elza was born 2 October 1903 in the French-established community of Brunot near the Mississippi River in southeast Missouri. My mother, of English lineage, was born in the small township of Centerville, Missouri [the county seat], on Highway 21 several miles west of Mayberry, on 11 January 1907. She was 16 and my father was 20 when they married.
Their first child, Velva, born in 1923, died of a child-hood ailment shortly before her second birthday and five months after the birth of their second daughter, Jessie. They were to have eight more children — spaced about 22 months apart.
On the morning of my birth my mother named me Elza Lafayette after my father, but from Day One I became known as Boye, which everyone then pronounced as boy.
I was born at home with no doctor in attendance. My birth was never officially recorded, and there is no record of my original first name [Elza] ever having been used by anyone.
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My mother, who had only an 8th grade education, was a closet romantic and far more intelligent and accomplished than most of her nine surviving children realized during her life. She was vague about where she came up with the name Boye (written without the macron over the “e” until the invention of devices that made it possible), later telling me that it was the word “boy” with an “e” added to give it a French look because I was the first son following a string of three daughters and my father’s ancestry was French
I credit serendipity for a remarkable career that encompassed a diversity of things no one could have imagined, given my early background.
This included playing a pioneer role in the rise of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China as economic super-powers; in the emergence of Thunderbird School of Global Management alumnae brother Merle Hinrichs as the largest trade magazine publisher in Asia, major financial donor to Thunderbird and a member of the board of directors of the school; and in the rise of go-go entrepreneur Larry Flynt to prominence and great wealth as the publisher of HUSTLER magazine and other publications and a powerful influence on American culture and civil rights.
Then there were encounters he had with a wide variety of notables, including Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, one of America’s top World War II Naval leaders, as well as relationships with Yoshio Karita, former protocol officer for Japan’s Imperial Family, and other famous people.
Another memorable event in his career: he is in the Guinness Book of World Records for a 1957 four-month long journey he made from Japan to Alaska on an amphibious jeep named HALF-SAFE with the world-circling jeep’s Australian owner and “captain” Ben Carlin…a feat he later chronicled in a book entitled ONCE A FOOL! — From Japan to Alaska by Amphibious Jeep.
According to De Mente, at no time in his long career did he think that what he was doing was remarkable or that it would have a fundamental influence on the lives of so many people or that it would contribute to the future of so many nations.
A full list of books written by De Mente is included at the end of this memoir. It is availble from Amazon.
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