My name is Jon Garate. The last name is Basque and not easy for English speaking people to pronounce. If you say it like Karate exchanging the K with a hard G, that would be about as close as you could get.
     I was born in Potter’s Maternity Home in Susanville California in 1945 and within a couple of days was whisked off to the high desert region in northeast California known as the Madeline Plains where my family had a homestead cattle ranch six miles east of the little town of Ravendale. You can see this on Google Maps by searching Ravendale Airport.
     The Madeline Plains, or The Flat as we called the old dry lakebed, was isolated and desolate. In this regard, it has not changed much to this day.
     It was there that I lived the first twenty years of my life. It was there that I lived in primitive American pioneer conditions. My first published book Stories From the Livingroom, provides not only my own stories of that way of life but also stories of my contemporaries and stories of the generations before mine.
I had the pioneer experiences of milking the cow, gathering eggs, churning butter, working as a cowboy, driving a team of horses and wagon, putting up haystacks with a pitchfork, and all the other kinds of work we did without the benefit of modern machinery. At first, I never thought much about any other way of life. Maybe when you are a child you think the whole world lives like you do until you have more experience.
     My experience began to change when we got our first tractor. I liked that a lot. I fell in love with modern machinery from that time forth.  But the homesteads were not very prosperous, and we advanced very slowly. By the time I left home at twenty, we were still building our haystacks with pitchforks.
     My first experience of living in modern Culture was when I was sent off to the city to go to high school. For the first two years there was no bus service to our area, and in fact mine was the first generation to even go to high school, and we had to board out. That was a very difficult time for me. What I experienced I learned later on was described by the term culture shock, and I had it real bad. I loved having electric lights, and all that goes with electric power, and I loved modern machinery. But I was terrorized by the way people treated each other so differently.
     But I survived the culture shock and even went on to graduate from college. I adapted and I improvised my way of life to function in modern society, but in my mind there is still a stark difference between my early life and what we see today in our modern culture.
My first recognition of the liberty I had lived in compared to modern liberty did not come as an epiphany but grew over a number of years.
Now it has been over thirty years that I have been intermittently studying on American liberty, politics, and the U.S. Constitution, and I am now finally ready to share all I have learned that I can squeeze into three inexpensive books.
     I have no claim to fame. I have no high-profile acquaintances backing me. I have no financial backing. What I do have is my experience, my knowledge, and a more powerful-than-ever love for liberty and the U.S. Constitution. It is the Constitution that protects our rights and liberty, but only if it is properly administered, which is not happening at this time. So much of our liberty has been lost, and to restore and preserve that liberty, we-the-people must learn how to use our Constitution and then do our part.
     I experienced firsthand what true liberty is. I have seen that liberty decline over the years until it is now barely a shadow of what it once was. I do hope that you will take the chance and try my liberty books.