From Hell To Iowa

From Hell to Iowa is the story of an incredible journey taken by Charles Notis. The author was born in 1944 in far southern Albania, which was under the ruthless dictatorship of Enver Hoxha for about forty years. Charlie and his mother were separated from the rest of the family when the border between Albania and Greece was suddenly closed in the spring of 1945. After living in this hell on earth for the first ten years of his life, Charlie and his mother made a miraculous escape from Albania in October 1954. They then joined the rest of the family a year later and settled in Brockton, Massachusetts. The chain of events that followed are miraculous in their own regard. The Vietnam War was especially significant in the author's life, although he served in the Army only a short time. He found his way to graduate school at Iowa State University where he earned a master's degree in meteorology and then, with meteorologist Harvey Freese, founded a weather consulting company called Freese-Notis Weather. This process, along with raising a family in Iowa, is also fascinating in the way it came about. This hard-to-believe contrast in the author's life is appropriately titled From Hell to Iowa.