Learning Life's Lessons
By J. Tracy Hermann

LuAn Mitchell Halter's life in the headlines is one that many a woman (or man for that matter) would envy. With experiences that include winning a beauty pageant, being at the top of the public speaking circuit and enjoying a host of corporate and financial successes, Mitchell-Halter's life would appear enviable.

But it's her life behind the headlines that this Palm Desert beauty queen-turned businesswoman-turned author is most proud of – the personal victories that have come from matching calamity with serenity, defining her own unique place in the universe and the realization of the bounty of love that courses through her veins.

Her compilation of personal experiences is chronicled in "Paper Doll: Lessons Learned From a Life Lived in the Headlines" (Jodere Group, 2004, $24), the riveting story of Mitchell-Halter's personal journey that begins as a young farm girl from the wrong side of the Saskatoon ( Saskatchewan, Canada) tracks.

"'You've ruined your life,' my mother said coldly when I was 16 years old," Mitchell-Halter writes in her book. "I thought she was right. I had done the worst thing a teenage girl in a small town could do: I was pregnant and starting to show."

After the birth of her child, she regained her fit figure and, on a lark, entered a regional beauty pageant.

Mitchell-Halter went on from the pageant to become Canada's number one female entrepreneur, climbing from the brink of poverty to a lavish life as a multi-millionaire. Along the way she survived the loss of her first husband, Fred Mitchell, following a lengthy illness and fought boardroom battles for control of their profitable meat-packing company.

Today, Mitchell-Halter lives in a beautiful home-estate at the cusp of the Santa Rosa Mountains with husband Dr. Reese Halter, the founder and president of Global Forest Science – a leader in forest science research – children's book author and host of "Dr. Reese's Planet."

The two share their love of nature and, more recently, a passion for the desert.

"From the first minute I landed here, I knew I was home," Mitchell-Halter says of her arrival to the valley. "Reese is also greatly inspired by the desert."