Donna Meredith interviews Phil Oakley, author of The Oakleys series

Book Summaries

Little Hatchet

When his brother is kidnapped from their New Mexico cabin, 12-year-old Walter Oakley sets off in pursuit, launching a multi-generational saga. Following the Oakley family from 1800s frontier life among Apaches and Comanches through Prohibition-era Texas, Little Hatchet chronicles their courageous struggle for survival amid unimaginable tragedy, violence, and determination.

Runners

Walter Oakley and his wife, Ada, used the westward expansion of America to establish themselves as model citizens in the town of Telegraph, Texas. Now, they watch in despair as their children lurch from one crisis to another — rum running, train-hopping outlaws, shattered dreams. With one child dead and another on the wrong side of the law, Walter and Ada struggle to keep their younger children on the straight and narrow. But trouble and temptation beckon as Prohibition and the Great Depression give way to the horrors of World War II. Will hope survive the chaos?

 Austin Sunrise

Passion, Power, and the Price of Change. Discover the sweeping saga of ambition, family, and the American spirit in this richly layered novel set against the dramatic backdrop of wartime and postwar Texas. Follow the unforgettable journeys of Brooks and Ray Oakley, two brothers whose divergent paths take them across military frozen landscapes, bustling Austin cafes, cutthroat oil fields, and the booming postwar restaurant scene.

Interview

Donna Meredith: Writing any book is a big undertaking that takes many months if not years. How long did you work on this series?

Phil Oakley

Phil Oakley: Sixty-two years. I began what would become The Oakleys series in the spring of 1964. I didn’t work on it nonstop for all those years. I had a career and had to earn a living. I finally came up with a manuscript that I began shopping around in 1998. I got an agent, and she got a conditional agreement with Atlantic Monthly Press. They wanted the massive manuscript divided into three separate books. I became seriously ill, and I was unable to work for a year. By the time I began working on the changes they requested, the company had moved on. Shortly after, my agent developed a serious illness and was forced to close her agency. It was 2001, and The Oakleys was back to square one.

DM: What motivated or inspired you to write about this story?

PO: In the middle of my freshman year at the University of Texas at Austin, I was trying to figure out how to tell the world about two wonderful people who had given me so much. They were such extremely fine people that I felt the world had a lot to learn from them, and I believed the best way to accomplish that goal was to write a book as a tribute to them.

DM: Did any particular ancestor really speak to you?

PO: Two. Ada and Walter Oakley, my paternal grandparents. Both of them were and still are amazing humans who are easy to love, look up to, learn from and be inspired by.

DM: What research was required for the writing of this story? What resources were available to you? Did you have photographs? Letters?

 PO: The research began in 1964 and didn’t end until the final edits were made early in 2026. I had photographs, letters, lots of newspaper stories and high school yearbooks. Living histories from the Fort Worth Historical Society, some private recollections that were preserved in the Lamar University Library in Beaumont, Texas, all proved invaluable. I used the libraries in the cities of Arlington, Fort Worth, Dallas and Austin. I learned a lot about the building of the Southern Pacific Railroad using books and files from all those sources. All those libraries were also hugely important in learning the history, behavior, determination and values of the Mescalero Apache people of New Mexico.

 I had at least seven decades of listening to family stories told in my presence by members of my own family and a good number of people who had known them or heard about them during their lifetimes.

Uniquely, I had a hundred-page memoir/novel that my father had written while I was in college. It was invaluable in learning about his experiences of riding freight trains from Texas to California during the Great Depression.

Donna Meredith

DM: What details were most challenging to get right about the setting?

 PO: The home territory of the Mescalero people in New Mexico was especially challenging. I have visited there numerous times, but the story had to be accurately told about the way life was lived by both the tribal people and the Anglos and others of northern European ancestry who were moving into the traditional lands of the Mescalero. And all of it had to be navigated on horseback through rugged territory where there were few established roads and mostly trails that had been used for centuries.

I was determined that the encounters involving the Oakley family in the first book in the series with the Mescalero and Comanche would absolutely avoid the pitfalls of the common and misguided stereotypes perpetrated against early American people by the writers of nineteenth century dime novels, early movies and television episodes. All these mischaracterized native groups as some sort of vicious and subhuman species. American Indians were wrongfully and shamefully portrayed as unfeeling and somehow beneath the Anglo settlers who invaded the lands where the indigenous people had lived for centuries.

DM: Tell us a little about your background and what got you started as a writer.

 PO: I grew up listening to news and drama on the radio. There was no television where I lived until after I was in second grade. By third grade, I thought it would be great to work giving the news on the radio. I loved to read newspapers and books, especially books about American history. I spent lots of Saturdays in the library just exploring everything on the shelves, periodicals and books, vertical files—even old maps.

By the time I graduated from high school, I was already working in radio. I thought it would be great to work for a network. I also was intrigued with the idea of making a movie, not acting, but producing a movie. I also had a strong desire to write, and I began writing short stories and submitting them to various publications. They were all returned in the required self-addressed stamped envelope I sent along with the stories.

Eventually, I would go on to see all these dreams realized. I moved from radio news to television news, mostly because it paid so much better. I spent thirteen years working at Disney’s ABC News division. Almost miraculously, I would retire early from Disney/ABC to finish my journalism career at The Dallas Morning News.

Before moving from local television news to the network, I was fortunate enough to be appointed as director of the Louisiana Film Commission, where I participated in the production of dozens of motion pictures, live network television specials and national television commercials. Finally, the Oakleys series of books found their place in traditional book publication, when Stoney Creek Publishing released volume one in the series, Little Hatchet, in 2024. Stoney Creek has also agreed to publish a fourth novel that I am writing currently, for release in 2027.

DM: What question do you wish interviewers would ask you?

PO: Who is Peyote, and what did he do that was so critical to the success of this series of novels? He is the single invented character lit the spark that lifted this project off the ash heap and made the series of three books see the light of commercial publication.

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Phil Oakley is a novelist and veteran journalist with experience in the motion picture industry. He is a retired regional executive with The Walt Disney Company (ABC News), a former director of the Louisiana Film Commission and a retired editor with the Dallas Morning News. He covered presidents and presidential campaigns beginning with Lyndon Johnson and ending with George W. Bush. He was a television and radio anchor and reporter with national awards from Columbia University, the Radio-Television News Directors Association and a National Headliner Award. He began work on his first novel in 1964 while a student at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written nine novels.