The Scrapbook Lecture: ...a collection of suspects.

by Gary B. Haley, Alice Stearns (Illustrator)

The Scrapbook Lecture is a fact-based historical fiction novel that reads more like an adventure story than a history book. Sit in on a popular lecture and allow yourself the simple luxury of floating through time with a gifted raconteur as he chauffeurs your imagination through the intermingled storylines of history. Key moments in time come to life as the professor summarizes the years before November 22, 1963, focusing on the actions and reactions that led many to hate President Kennedy bitterly. The lecture is based upon a scrapbook that was collected and cherished by a woman with early ties to the Kennedys. The professor's scrapbook lecture and adventure stories explain why so many people hated JFK enough to wish ill will upon him during a time when most Americans truly loved their president, and ends just moments before the conspiracy theories surface and begin to pollute the truth. Twenty-eight years of work and research assure that all the actual events portrayed in the past are as accurate as possible. No theories are proposed and no key facts are based upon speculation. The Scrapbook Lecture is as pure and reliable as history allows, so that one may draw their own conclusions.

310 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 22, 2021

About the author

Gary B. Haley began life in a military family that frequently moved from one air force base to another. The first few years of Haley's life were spent in cities like Denver, Kansas City and Detroit, but finally, in the late '60s, the young family happily found their way back home to Fort Worth, Texas. It was there that Haley grew up with his brothers very near Carswell Air Force Base (now the Naval Air Station and Joint Reserve Base). This meant that they often had to tolerate the thunderous, deafening roar of huge B-52 bombers lumbering overhead a mere four or five thousand feet. At first, the brothers tried to shout over the noise, but even the rowdy football games being played in the street came to a halt until the plane was far enough away for everyone to hear the shouted warning, "Car!" There was little else to do but plug your ears and wait, and maybe watch the plane.

Such an environment seems to sever much of the day into twenty- or thirty-minute tolerable fragments, still, when Haley wasn't playing football, riding his bike, or winning a game of chess (unless he was playing his big brother) he was probably reading. At some point, The Beatles' hit, Paperback Writer, inspired him to start writing at a very young age, despite the harsh, thunderous roars of the B-52s.

A break from that relentless chaos came with a move to a waterfront home on a quiet cove of a nearby lake, where Haley finished high school. But despite the more enjoyable lifestyle of country living, Haley ultimately moved back to Fort Worth to accept a defense industry job on the air force base, where F-16s had taken the place of B-52s. Soon afterwards, however, he found himself a single parent, but did his best to meet the challenges of trying to raise two daughters while working full time, ghost writing part time, and finishing his software engineering degree.

His daughters have long since grown up and, between them, have four bright kids of their own. Haley moved to Denver in 2005 where he married a brilliant doctor. They eventually had a son and Haley retired from software engineering to be a stay-home dad.