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The book was written to share the many acts of kindness I encountered across a wide variety of sub-cultures from my early childhood into my senior years. I have learned that we are all the same. We simply need to look behind the ways various cultures have shaped each of us in expressing our humanity to realize this truth.
My journey found me living in fourteen states. I attended eight different public schools in four states. After completing a master’s degree in school psychology and a year of Army training, I became an instructor at the Army’s Special Warfare Center. Then I became a school psychologist servicing seven inner city schools being integrated for the first time. Then I earned a doctorate in psychology. I became the director of an educational cooperative serving rural school systems in East Tennessee as they were implementing new 1973 special education requirements. While directing the cooperative, I served as a due process hearing officer in special education law, directed an alternative school for suspended students, and directed an APA accredited doctoral school psychology internship program. My work is referenced in several publications. Books I have written include A School for Healing: Alternative Strategies for Teaching At-Risk Students (with Rosa Kennedy), Reluctant Lieutenant: From Basic to OCS in the Sixties, Finding My Way: A Memoir and Swimming Up Stream: The Little Tennessee Valley Educational Cooperative. I have read many of the stories on a podcast (findingmyway.libsyn.com).
Reviewed by Ruffina Oserio for Readers' Favorite
Jerry Morton’s memoir, Finding My Way, traces a remarkable life across the American landscape, from being born into a roving Coast Guard family through the rough Wisconsin subdivisions, Pittsburgh suburbs, and Illinois trailer parks, to college in Kentucky, Army service at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, and a revolutionary career in special-education law and school psychology. The book is structured as vivid, true stories originally presented in the author’s podcast, recounting the explosive school bus rebellions, playground bullies, con artists at a poultry shop, a near-fatal interstate accident, and summer jobs on Texas dredge boats. Yet the heartbeat of this work is the author’s later quest: a decades-long inquiry into psychic phenomena, past-life hints, auras, and spiritual synchronicity that challenges his scientific beliefs and expands his sense of what it means to be human.
Finding My Way is about grit, the fluidity of memory, and the courage required to honor one’s truth over perceived comfort. Jerry Morton’s storytelling is unembellished, and it brilliantly captures the sweat, the slang, and the danger of mid-century America. This memoir gave me three powerful lessons: first, reality transcends strict materialist boundaries; second, we build self-respect by refusing to be victimized, even at great physical risk; and third, small, authentic acts of honesty and kindness reverberate across decades, healing old wounds, binding strangers, and revealing the hidden unity beneath our seemingly separate lives. The author’s documented encounters with psychics and shared auras compelled me to question my understanding of reality. He writes in a voice that is arresting, unassuming, yet filled with authority.
