glenwood neighbors

John Summit's Bio

John was born In Denver, Colorado in 1961. His mother, a Nisei (first generation Japanese American), was born in Coyote, California and lived there until 1942, when she and her family were interned in Heart Mountain, Wyoming, just east of the eastern entrance to Yellowstone National Park. After the war she ended up in Chicago, where she met and married

his father. They moved to Denver where they had John and rapidly came to the conclusion that one child was enough.

Growing up, John was the stereotypical All-American boy, roaming the streets of Denver with his faithful dog and constantly getting grounded for playing baseball until it was too dark to see the ball and missing dinner. His love of playing baseball (and eventually, softball) continued into his late 30’s which led him to run his routes at the PO in order to make it to games and ultimately switch his health plan to Kaiser because the copay was cheaper than the insurance deductible for his twice-monthly visits to the ER.

John headed to the Bay Area for college, majoring in journalism at San Francisco State University with the intention of using journalism as a steppingstone to becoming the next Hemingway. After realizing that making up stories for his assignments was likely not conducive to a long and successful journalism career, he switched his major to English Lit because it

sounded more substantial than Creative Writing and became the most illiterate Lit major in the world.

A chance meeting with Erik Holland, an aspiring artist and fellow Kerouac aficionado who would become a lifelong friend, led to a few years of beatnik adventures, hanging out in bars, clubs, and assorted salt-of-the-earth establishments writing and sketching. They once got thrown out of the McDonald’s near the Powell-Market cable car turnaround.

By 1986, funds running low, John stumbled into the rabbit hole of the USPS. This would be the first step towards fulfilling his belatedly discovered ambition in life: travelling and payingfor it.

In 1990 John discovered in a street publication called The Learning Annex a seminar on budget travel by some guy named Rick Steves. This was before Rick Steves was RICK STEVES. The lessons learned in the seminar unlocked the doors to the planet and that fall John spent a month backpacking in Europe and fine-tuning those lessons.

In March of the following year John was at a preseason softball practice with one of his myriad teams. While shagging balls during batting practice a teammate and friend said to him, “My wife knows someone she’d like to introduce to you.” John, being laser focused on the upcoming season, replied, “Talk to me in October.” That someone turned out to be Sandy Barnecut, who remains to this day his partner in crime and, for some reason, did wait until October, no doubt mesmerized by his sound reasoning. Since then they have travelled and hiked around the world, the high point, both figuratively and literally being Mount Kilimanjaro at 19,341 feet in elevation.

In 2007 John had to vacate the route he was holding down temporarily (for 18 years). His landing spot was the Glenwood neighborhood, which has become his home for the last 18+ years. He has had the extremely good fortune to spend every day of those years with his friends-human, canine, and feline. And get paid for it. As he rides off into the sunset he is proof of the saying, “You can take the boy out of the ‘hood but you can’t take the ‘hood out of the boy.”