Harlow Franklin Newton Jr. was born in April 1946 in San José, Costa Rica to a Guatemalan mother (Concha Valenzuela) and a U.S. American father (Harlow F. Newton Sr.) His family moved to Coral Gables, Florida when he was six and he returned to Central America at the beginning of middle school, living in Honduras and then El Salvador. Harlow went on to finish High School at Staunton Military Academy in Virginia before getting his B.S in International Relations at Jacksonville Univ. in Florida.
After college he served as a Chemical Officer in the U.S Army for five years, being stationed most of the time in Germany. In 1974, he returned to El Salvador and lived there for over twenty years, owning several companies that he founded as well as starting and managing companies in all five Central American countries for a Colorado-based corporation.
Harlow was honored by his peers to be elected President of the American Chamber of Commerce in El Salvador for three terms, was Regional VP for two terms and finally elected to be one of the Executive Vice Presidents for the US Chamber of Commerce for Latin America out of Washington D.C.
During the eighties Harlow gave major speeches on the El Salvador dilemma throughout Central America and in Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Dominical Rep., as well as New Orleans, Miami, New York and Washington D.C. When he turned fifty, he said good-bye to his coat and tie and lousy banker friends and spent four years in the San Francisco Bay Area, starting a local discount club to help the small Hispanic merchants in the Mission District, then lived in Northern Arizona near his daughters for some time before returning to his homeland of Costa Rica in 2004.
Since then, he has been enjoying a reflective life near some of his children writing and wood carving on the beautiful Pacific Coast. He has written six romance-comedies, with two more on the way, in addition to numerous collections of poems and short stories.
