Don grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania where the World War II soldiers were fathers of his boyhood.  His own father returned from the war in the Pacific and married the only girl he ever loved. Her name was Peggy. Nine months later she gave birth to his twin sons and then died.  He was shattered and spent that autumn sleeping on her grave.  In the mornings, soldiers he had gone to war with, would swing by the cemetery and take him to the coffee shop in town to try to help him talk through his grief.  

When Don’s father finally told him this story about how the WWII soldiers had saved his life, it was 1998 and his father was dying of a brain tumor. Don set out to write a book about his mother’s brief love story with his father. Of Time & Memory was published in 2000 by Alfred A. Knopf of New York. During his research Don discovered that Peggy was only nineteen years old and that she was dying slowly through her pregnancy but rather than save her own life, she chose to carry her twins to full term. She died sixteen days later. She had made her doctor promise never to tell anyone so that her sons would not have to go through life knowing they had caused her death. 

When Don learned this he became haunted, day and night, and a great darkness settled over his life. He found his way to Scotland and it was working there as caddie at Kingsbarns and The Old Course that saved him.  Each round of golf he caddied gave him the chance to disappear from his own story and enter the story of the golfer at his side. Gradually that feeling of being haunted lifted. 

Ten years later when he learned of the soldiers haunted by what they had been through, he knew that working as caddies could save their lives as well. He began to see that his own darkness and the years of being haunted had prepared him perfectly to minister to these soldiers.  And so, in 2018 he established the school to honor the World War II soldiers who rescued his father from desolation, and to honor this new generation of soldiers by preparing them for a profession as caddies where they could rise above the darkness into the light.