Horatio Alger wrote in the nineteenth century about impoverished boys rising from humble backgrounds to lives of achievement through hard work, determination, courage, and honesty. Alger should have met John Volken. He would have loved him, as many of us do.

John's story begins as a child in an orphanage in the Soviet Union occupied East Germany, it continues as a young man washing dishes for 25[ an hour in Canada, and culminates with him amassing a fortune as a businessman...

That is where the venerable American writer might have ended this story and where most men would have settled into a life of golf. But that's exactly where the best and most exciting part of John Volken's story begins... It's all here, and then some!

David Berner,
TV Personality/Author
Executive Director
Drug Prevention Network of Canada