It is dusk, the cicadas are humming, and Rotarian John Lee Hoich is baring his soul in his driveway. “When I was little,” he says, “my [stepfather] called me a no-good, rotten bastard who would never amount to anything.”

It is a long driveway, lined with coffee trees, and it leads up to a sprawling home fronted by a towering, hand-carved marble fountain. Hoich continues his story as he shows a visitor the other trappings of his success – a stable of horses, a collection of exotic animals, an elaborate backyard with manmade waterfalls, and a pond where 150 koi swim beneath paddling geese.

It wasn’t only verbal abuse, Hoich says. For years, his stepfather beat him every day. He beat his mother and his five younger siblings, too. One night, when Hoich was 10 years old, his stepfather “tried to kill all of us . . . in the kitchen, with a steak knife.”

Hoich, now 49, a Major Donor and a member of the Rotary Club of Omaha-Suburban, Neb., USA, is as driven to tell this story as he was to move beyond the horrible reality of his early life. He tells it in speeches – more than 600 of them to date. And he published it in a book, From the Ground Up: It’s Not Just Business, the proceeds of which he’s donating to The Rotary Foundation and several Omaha charities.

It’s the story of an abused child, orphaned at age 16 and left with little means, who used his meager inheritance – a lawnmower – to start a business that made him a millionaire by the age of 30, and a generous philanthropist in Omaha and beyond. Hoich has made a $100,000 bequest to The Rotary Foundation, and recently made a $250,000 gift of a fully paid, wholly owned life insurance policy.

For a young man, Rotary was a refuge and a place to make friends, says Hoich, who joined his club when he was just 22. The organization soon became a favorite charity for a simple reason: “I believe in it.”

“Service Above Self,” Hoich says. “Anybody who knows me knows I’ve given until it hurt. And The Four-Way Test, that’s not just a quote. For 27 years, I’ve lived by it.”

Mowing for millions

Hoich’s story could have turned out very differently. After the knife attack, he never again saw his stepfather, a professional wrestler and violent drunk, and his mother soon suffered a series of nervous breakdowns. Over the next few years, he lived in four foster homes. In two of them, he says, the foster father tried to molest him. In 1974, when Hoich was 16, his mother died suddenly, at the age of 39.

The only things she left were a Sears Craftsman lawnmower and an inheritance of $3,300 for each child when they turned 21. All of the children were sent to foster care. Around the same time, Hoich’s stepfather died. The responsibility for keeping the family together rested on Hoich alone.

He began building a mowing business, Green Star Lawn Care, while attending Westside High School in a suburb of Omaha. He had a partner named Joe Smith, a childhood buddy who would go on to become a hard-nosed county prosecutor. Smith had a pickup truck and a mower. Hoich had the gift of gab and the drive to succeed.

Hoich wasn’t shy about approaching potential customers, and the business quickly grew. “Even back when we were kids, he was clear about where he wanted his life to go,” says Smith, still Hoich’s best friend. “He knew what he wanted to do and was willing to work hard to do it.”

Hoich began investing in real estate while attending the University of Nebraska. He bought a $6,500 house using $1,500 of his inheritance money as a down payment, and then worked out a deal with his fraternity brothers: If they helped him renovate the house, they could use it for weekend parties. He sold the house two years later for $13,500.

Hoich bought out Smith’s share of the lawn service for about $400 when Smith went to law school. He then built a duplex, renting out half and running his lawn care business out of the other half. At age 21, he launched Hoich Enterprises, a grounds maintenance and real estate company.

The lawn service sprouted big time for Hoich in 1991, when he and some partners founded a company called U.S. Grounds Maintenance and landed a groundskeeping contract at Offutt Air Force Base in Bellevue, near Omaha. That led to similar jobs at Air Force bases in Georgia, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Wyoming.

Hoich worked 12- to 16-hour days. Fond of saying, “You have to circulate to percolate,” he’d hand out 50 business cards a day. He dreamed up deals in the shower, then put together networks of people to make them happen.

Each deal led to something bigger. Hoich bought an ethanol plant in South Dakota, an assisted-living facility in Iowa, and a meatpacking plant in Kansas. When the Air Force privatized the residences at the Offutt base, he bought 2,400 units.

A lot of people say, “Shoulda, coulda, woulda,” Hoich writes in his book. But he says, “Dida, dida, dida.” No indecision. No second thoughts.

‘Share what you can’

Even as he was making money, Hoich was giving a lot of it away. Along with a friend, he helped raise $100,000 for Rotary club projects in 1985 by commissioning and selling pewter sculptures by Colorado artist Michael Anthony Ricker. Hoich is well known in his Rotary club, where he’s active in meetings and events, often bringing guests. When the club needs anything – door prizes, a place to hold an outdoor fundraiser, mowing of donated land – Hoich steps up, says past club president Carma Scheafer. He’s also the District 5650 Membership Development Committee chair and recently received a 29-year perfect-attendance pin.

Last year, he gave $400,000 to an Omaha homeless shelter, the Stephen Center, to build a new home for its chemical dependency treatment programs. The donation came after Hoich noticed that the center would be built on the site of one of his stepfather’s old drinking haunts, the First and Last Chance bar.

Despite the beatings he took after those drinking sessions, no matter how diminished he felt, Hoich never considered failure. “I just kept mowing and mowing,” he says. “Then I came back all these years later and I gave back.”