John Leng was born 15 March 1933 in the Czech Republic, He and his sister Dorith were raised in the Roman Catholic tradition by their Jewish parents. His father, Valentin, had been a Captain in the Austrian Army during WW I. During this war, he was taken prisoner by the Russians and spent some time in a Siberian prison camp. Then, in the early stages of WW II, the Germans wanted to recruit him. To escape this, he took his family and fled Czechoslovakia to Denmark in 1939. John's father spent one year in Denmark planning and arranging for an escape from German controlled Europe to the USA. When John was seven years old, the four family members escaped via Sweden, then Finland, then they spent twelve days traveling across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway to an eastern Russian seaport, then a boat to Japan where they then took a Japanese ship to San Francisco in 1940 just prior to our war with Japan. John had hoped to become a doctor and fulfilled his premedical requirements at Universities in San Francisco and Berkeley. Then he completed two years of study at Creighton University in Omaha. He received a BS degree in English from Xavier University in Cincinnati, then later a Master's degree in Counseling & Guidance at Xavier. John and his mother moved to Cincinnati in 1958. John worked at several places in and around Cincinnati as a chemist. John was married to Lois in 1962, and together they had one child, a daughter, Ellen who resides in California. She is a physician specializing in emergency medicine. John had multiple medical issues later in life, and through this showed an exceptionally strong will to live. His last year was particularly difficult for him and he spent time in several Cincinnati hospitals, but he died peacefully at Bethesda North 30 October 2015 at 82 years of age. Services have been held.