As a weekly columnist for the opinion section of the Deseret News from 2003 until his death in 2016, my late husband, John Florez, wrote about the empathy and compassion that guided his life. Using those articles as the primary source, along with letters, emails, notes, and some excerpts and articles written about him, I compiled a memoir of his early years. John had a gift of making the past pertinent to our present-day lives. A "poor Mexican kid...