John Gatch, Jr., a small-town boy from Milford, Ohio, served overseas in WWII and then joined the Foreign Service in 1947 after graduating from Princeton University. Anne Schmidt, from the more cosmopolitan Chicago, also sought adventure overseas as a Foreign Service secretary after graduating from Smith College. They met in war-torn Warsaw, married, and subsequently traveled the world with their five children. Ultimately the family showed the strain of the diplomatic life amid the turbulence of the Middle East from the creation of Israel in 1947 to the first Gulf War in 1992.