Steve was born in Butte Montana, a town famous for having the largest open pit copper mine in the world. In the late fifties, it was closed due to a drop in copper prices. You can still see it though and the opening is about one mile across. He moved with his family to southern California when he was five years old and attended local schools in Covina and Anaheim through High School.
Steve explained that he found his profession, Chemical Engineering, one day when he went to the placement center at the University of California, Irvine and read a chart on the wall that showed how well the graduates from each profession did in the previous year. He had majored in Chemistry, and saw that there had been more than 17,000 graduates the previous year in chemistry, but only about 200 had found work. Right below that was Chemical Engineering, which there had been about 3,000 graduates, all but two had found work. He decided in that moment to change majors.
A couple of year ago, a friend at his church suggested he and his family start an orphanage in her home town, Guidong China. Guidong is a tiny little town in the middle of the Hunan province, and the Pelletiers were only the second group of Westerners ever to visit. Although they had hoped to remain incognito, they soon realized that was impossible, and their visits to the children were accompanied by five cars of city officials, cameramen, and others. They realized that the local schools already had dormitories for most of their pupils because most students homes were too far away from the city to travel each day. Guidong valley is a farming community and the schools in the city support the whole valley. The Pelletiers started a foundation to help the children who had lost their parents to pay the costs to stay in a dormitory, buy books and supplies, and other incidental living expenses.
Steve said that the U.S. Flying Tigers had been fighting the Japanese in China during WWII and one of them, Hoyle Upchurch, disappeared in bad weather on Oct. 6, 1944. It was his first mission with the 74th Fighter Squadron. The citizens of Guidong found his body and buried him on a hillside outside of town. Sixty years later, they notified the Upchurch family in North Carolina and the U.S. Army sent a team to confirm the identity. DNA evidence confirmed that it was Hoyle. The Pelletiers commemorated the event by naming the education foundation after Hoyle Upchurch.