When James Clayton Lutz was born on 13 October 1929, in Elizabethtown, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, United States, his father, Rev Clarence Erb Lutz, was 26 and his mother, Ruth Luella Nissley Herr, was 28. He married Shirley Moyer Kolb on 27 September 1952. He died on 25 January 2009, in Hershey, Derry Township, Dauphin, Pennsylvania, United States, at the age of 79, and was buried in Elizabethtown, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, United States.