Local math teacher pens novel

Thomas Neese saw his childhood dream come true with the publishing of his first book.
Neese, an Enterprise math teacher, is the author of “By The Creek,” a novel that details how circumstantial events help to overcome life’s temptations. The main character is a young man named Tom Sharkey, whose only dream is to play baseball. He meets a waitress, Neese said, and “the result is a career decision and a love story.”
In some ways, the novel parallels incidents in his life, Neese said.
Born during the Great Depression to an ailing mother, Neese was soon orphaned. “Having lost my mother and younger brother through sickness and death and my father through divorce, all before the age of 18 months, I lived with my great-grandparents.”
At age 11, Neese was put in the Milton Hershey School in Hershey, Pa. “That was an orphanage for boys at that time founded by Milton S. Hershey, father of the famous Hershey Bar.
“I helped to milk the cows that contributed the milk for the Hershey Bar,” Neese remembered. “MHS was gratifying in that I learned the printing trade and at the same time, learned farming and animal herd care.” That was in addition to “everything from darning socks to pressing pants,” he added. “And all the fine details of house cleaning.”
Calling the seven years at MHS, “beneficial years I later realized to appreciate,” Neese said those years and experiences would “make an interesting book in itself, one I eventually hope to write.” He only included “a few of the most interesting and somewhat comical events of those years” in “By the Creek.”
After he graduated from high school in 1951, Neese worked as a printer until he joined the Air Force during the Korean War. “I qualified to be a printer as a bypass Specialist,” he recalled. “During that time, I met my lovely wife to be while stationed at Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City, Fla.”
After the Air Force, Neese was hired to work as a printer at Fort Rucker, and he attended what was then called Enterprise State Junior College at night. After earning his master’s degree with a double major in management and math, and a career that included work as a Department of Defense operations researcher during days and as a college business and math instructor at night, Neese retired.
“Toward the end of my 30-year career, I decided to write ‘By the Creek’,” Neese said. “It was a dream I cherished from my Hershey years.”
It’s the first book for Neese, but he said he is is working on a sequel called “Up The Creek.”
“Believe me, its going to have some heart-wrenching trauma and drama entwined into Tom Sharkey’s life,” he said.