T-R PHOTO BY ROBERT MAHARRY — Steve Ames of Marshalltown recently released his memoir, “Only Broken Seeds Grow,” and it is available in paperback and ebook formats on Amazon.

Steve Ames greatly struggled with reading as a child, so the Union native and current Marshalltown resident is especially proud of the fact that he’s managed to write five books in adulthood.

But his latest, titled “Only Broken Seeds Grow: True Stories of Success and Wealth Sprouting from Poverty and Pain,” is decidedly different from its predecessors, which were focused on real estate. For the first time, he’s telling a personal story about his formative years and the struggles he overcame to become a successful educator and, later in life, a real estate investor.

“It’s all about my childhood. It’s from my earliest memories up to adolescence, and they’re very impactful stories,” he said. “I had a lot of challenges. I had maybe five or 10 or 15 more challenges than the average kid. A lot of those were genetic and some of those were related to poverty.”

Among those challenges were severe dyslexia, colorblindness and a speech delay that would produce inaudible words coming from his mouth.

“Since I couldn’t read and couldn’t talk, I was a fencepost pretty much,” he said.

Unsurprisingly, these obstacles made it extremely difficult for him to make friends and communicate in a small, tight-knit school district like Union-Whitten — he said he was the only kid in his grade who wasn’t invited to sleepovers with friends — and he still remembers laughter filling the classroom after he colored a cat green.

“The teacher said ‘We’re not laughing at you. We’re all laughing with you.’ Of course it was a 100 percent lie. They were all laughing at me,” Ames said. “There wasn’t a single person there laughing with me because I wasn’t laughing.”

Ames was born in Eldora and moved to Michigan as a youngster before returning to Union in first grade. After spending most of his school years at U-W, he completed his senior year at Abraham Lincoln High School in Council Bluffs and graduated in 1969. He’s since reconciled with his old U-W classmates, and they still get together on a monthly basis.

From there, Ames completed degrees at Marshalltown Community College and Northwest Missouri State and began teaching in the U.S. on a Native American reservation before an opportunity pulled him overseas to Colombia and Spain.

Eventually, he came back to Marshalltown and taught Spanish at MCC before moving into real estate investment, which he’s now been at for 45 years. Ames plans to cover this section of his life in a future memoir, but “Only Broken Seeds Grow” is focused primarily on his childhood and the struggles he faced in dealing with an overbearing, “sadistic” father whose own demeanor, Ames surmised, may have arisen from being pulled out of school to work on a farm when he was a teenager.

“My father never had any money, and on rare occasions he got a penny and they called it tobacco money,” Ames said. “On very, very rare occasions he’d get two pennies, and only once did he get three pennies on a Saturday night for tobacco money. So he wanted us to feel his pain.”

Ames first hatched the idea for “Only Broken Seeds Grow” about five years ago and finished it by recording the audio and enlisting his daughter to transcribe it three years ago, but it initially sat on his shelf for quite some time. After he worked with an editor from Transcendent Publishing in Tampa, Fla., the book was finally widely released a few weeks ago.

The memoir, which is available in both paperback and ebook formats, has been climbing the charts on Amazon, and Ames plans to appear on several podcasts and hit libraries to promote it.

“Only Broken Seeds Grow” has received advance praise from several other authors, artists and people close to Ames, and he even has ambitions of someday creating a documentary or feature film adaptation of the stories. For now, however, he’s enjoying the satisfaction that comes with crossing yet another major accomplishment off of his list.

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Contact Robert Maharry at 641-753-6611 ext. 255 or

rmaharry@timesrepublican.com.