He earned his BA degree from Northwest University (Kirkland, Washington), and his MA from the University of Denver, with one term each at the Universities of Michigan and Washington. He headed Northwest University’s library for eight years, then held public library management positions in Idaho, California, and Florida. During part of that time he served as Idaho's Executive Director for National Library Week, and as President of the Idaho Library Association, and was listed in the Marquis Who’s Who volume "Who’s Who in the West."

While living in southern California, his first marriage ended in divorce.  His first wife and four children moved back to Idaho. 

Three years later he met his present wife, Yvonne, in Florida.  Their first child was conceived in Florida and born in California; the second, conceived in California and born in Florida.

In 1980, Pete joined Computer Sciences Corporation in San Diego as a senior technical librarian. A year later he was transferred to the Space Shuttle program in the Launch Control Center at Kennedy Space Center. Two years after that, Martin Marietta hired him as a "master planner" to help build a proposed Space Shuttle launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, and then to plan and build advanced radars, night vision systems, and missile systems in Florida.

This book began while he worked for Martin Marietta in Orlando, Florida.  During a backyard baseball game with his children, he tore the muscles in his right leg badly enough to end up in bed and off work for a month.  To avoid going "stir crazy" he leafed through his entire Bible, listing passages that talked about "loving our neighbors."  The 600 verses he found then laid the foundation for the book. (Later, with the aid of a thesaurus, the number grew to over 3,500.)

When the Cold War ended, the Orlando plant where Pete worked was cut from 17,000 employees to less than 4,000. At the same time, Yvonne’s doctor told her she had spinal arthritis and had to leave Florida’s humidity or face life in a wheelchair. None of the family wanted that, so we moved to the drier West to look for Pete’s next job.  Losing our home in the layoff began a nearly six-year period when we were homeless, living mostly in our small tent trailer.

From 1994 until 1999 the whole family traveled to Wal-Mart stores in eight western states, one store per week, making name-related gifts as representatives of "The Name Zone."  They continued that work over the Internet for several years after settling in Wyoming in 1999.