From Hell to Iowa

Book excerpt: “From Hell to Iowa” is about an incredible journey taken by Charles Notis. Charlie and his mother were separated from the rest of the family when the border between Albania and Greece was suddenly closed at the end of World War II when Charlie was less than a year old. Charlie’s father, older sister, grandmother, and uncle emigrated to the U.S., but Charlie and his mother were stuck in Albania for ten long years. Albania was more backward than a Third World country is today. It was under the ruthless dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, who cared more about building hundreds of thousands of machine gun bunkers to protect Albania against the bitter enemy, America, than he cared about the wellbeing of the population. In fact, he imprisoned or executed many thousands of innocent people. Charlie and his mother made a miraculous escape from this hell on earth in October 1954 and joined the rest of the family in Brockton, Massachusetts, in September 1955. While living in Massachusetts, the author experienced some incredible historical events that took place in the turbulent 1960s. One of these, the Vietnam War, is a very special event that greatly affected Charlie’s life. The author also acquired an amazing fascination with the weather soon after arriving in Brockton. This eventually led him to enroll at Iowa State University, where he received a master’s degree in meteorology. During graduate school at Iowa State, the author met a young lady who was majoring in mathematics, and he ended up marrying this beautiful lady. The fascinating story continues when Charlie along with Harvey Freese founded a weather consulting company called Freese-Notis Weather in Des Moines, Iowa. The contrast between where Charlie lived for the first ten years of his life compared to where he ended up, and everything that happened between, is appropriately titled, “From Hell to Iowa.”