John Hoyte
AUTHOR

John Hoyte

Biographies & Memoirs
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John Merrishaw Hoyte was born in 1932 in Ping Yang Fu, China, of medical missionary parents. He attended a British-run boarding school at Chefoo, Shantung Province, along with his three brothers and two sisters. During world war ll, the school was interned by the invading Japanese at the Weihsien Concentration Camp. After the war the family settled in England where he completed his education at Forest School, Essex, and Saint John’s College, Cambridge. After two years in the army as an instructor in electronics he worked in British industry for three years and then led The British Alpine Hannibal Expedition over the Alps with Jumbo, an Indian elephant, from the Turin Zoo. Coming to the US at age 27, he worked as an engineer at Hewlett-Packard Corporation, Palo Alto, California for six years, and was awarded a patent. He then founded his own company, Spectrex Corporation, in Silicon Valley, based on a direct reading spectroscope, invented by his eighty-six-year-old uncle. At age 36 he married Alma Polinsky, a nurse from Canada and they had two children, Elizabeth and Jonathan. Alma died of ovarian cancer after twenty one years of marriage. They lived in Menlo Park, California. After fifty years as president of Spectrex, he sold the company to the employees. John now lives in Bellingham, Washington, with his wife, Luci Shaw, a well known poet. His hobbies are sailing, tent camping, pen-and-ink sketching, acrylic painting and playing the classical guitar. His memoir, Persistence of Light, was published in 2018 by Terra Nova Books in Santa Fe, NM. It includes an account of his childhood in China, and the British Alpine Hannibal Expedition.
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  • Persistence of Light cover art

    • Persistence of Light

    • From a Japanese Prison Camp to an Elephant in the Alps to Silicon Valley
    • By: John Hoyte
    • Narrated by: John Hoyte
    • Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
    • Release date: 04-03-2021
    • Language: English
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