Book cover courtesy of Greg Hasty.
Greg Hasty is a fifth-generation Oak Cliff resident and an author of fiction, nonfiction and religious self-help books. And over the years of storytelling, he realized there was something missing about the stories often told about his home neighborhood.
Of course, you hear about Lee Harvey Oswald and the Texas Theater, Bonnie and Clyde and Stevie Ray Vaughan. But there is more to our neighborhood than a handful of gangsters and rockstars, as Hasty set out to prove in his latest novel, Oak Cliff and the Missing Pieces.Â
Hasty’s book will be for sale at a discounted price of $29.99 at a book signing, Sept. 9 at La Calle Doce from 10 a.m. to noon. All net proceeds from the book signing will be donated to Oak Cliff and West Dallas charities or nonprofits.
The novel began from a brainstorm with a friend, and Hasty decided to set out on the streets of his native neighborhood just to “see what all we could see.”
“It sort of compounded itself, because one trip brought on another, and then another, and another, another. And it was just like an endless array of really cool things that have went on in Oak Cliff over the years,” Hasty said.
Hasty said once he began looking into written histories of Oak Cliff, he realized one had not been released in the last 30 years. The book starts around the 1840s, and brings readers into the modern day, he said.
“History had been outdated in that regard, so not only does it cover a lot of things that had been missed by others, but it brings readers up to date to the current year,” Hasty said.
Hasty said he used a combination of first person accounts, interviews, old newspaper and magazine clippings and records to build the story of Oak Cliff’s history, especially the history that has gone “ignored.” Hasty interviewed people of color from across our neighborhood whose history has not been documented because of racial bias.
Over 125 biographies of people who have made notable contributions to Oak Cliff are included in the book, and most are accompanied by photos that have rarely been seen by the public before.
“Each one of these biographies tells the story of that individual, where they were from, what they did, when they were in Oak Cliff and why they’re celebrated,” Hasty said. “So that, in itself is exciting to me because there’s a lot of photographs that were provided by Oak Cliff residents. ”
Of course, the handful of gangsters and rockstars couldn’t be omitted from the book.
Hasty’s own eyewitness account of a “situation” leading up to the assassination of JFK is followed by a chapter on Lee Harvey Oswald’s arrest. And a narrative on Stevie Ray Vaughan comes from Greg’s childhood friends and classmates, many of whom knew Vaughan personally.
In total the book is 418 pages, with 464 photos.
“It’s just amazing,” Hasty said. “It was an amazing collaboration of all walks of life.”
