Stories My Father Wrote

John Richard Casey was born on October 30, 1940, in Tunnel Hill, Illinois — a wide spot in the road at the far southern tip of the state, where the rail line burrows straight through the hills and the family names go back further than anybody bothers to count. He was the fifth of eight children of Randolph and Edith Opal (Burton) Casey. The country that made him — the timber and the deer woods, the river towns, the small-town porches and the long memories — never really let go of his writing, no matter how far he wandered or how many years passed.

And he did wander. He left for Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in the fall of 1958, eighteen years old and full of ambition. A patronage job in Springfield came the next year, and for a while it looked like politics might be the road. But money was always short, and in 1963 he ran out of it before he ran out of school. He went to Princeton, Indiana, with a brother’s help — and it was there, around 1963, that he first picked up a golf club, the start of a love affair that would last the rest of his life. Michigan followed in 1965, a real salary, a real foothold. But one day in 1966 — he was earning his living selling headstones then, of all the ironies — he witnessed a train-car accident, the kind of sudden, horrible thing a small town never quite gets over. It shook him to the core. Before long he was back in Alton, empty pockets and a clean slate.

What he built from that slate was a career most men would envy. He became one of the top mortgage lenders in Southern Illinois — the man people came to when they wanted to buy a house and didn’t know how. A colleague once described him in writing as a lender known not only for his numbers but for “his imagination and writing ability,” which is about the most honest summary of John Casey anyone ever managed: he could close the loan, and then go home and write something beautiful about the people on the other side of the desk.

Because the writing was always there, underneath everything. He wrote about golf — the qualifying rounds, the caddies, the long friendships made walking eighteen holes. He wrote about the deer woods and the duck blinds, about his mother’s kitchen, about Tunnel Hill and Vienna and the people he grew up among. He wrote poems, and letters, and advice. He wrote about race and conscience with a directness that surprised people, and about the civic life of his country when it troubled him. He returned to the same stories again and again over the years, rewriting them not because he’d forgotten the earlier versions but because a good story is never quite finished — it just waits for you to come back and see it new.

He married twice. His first marriage gave him the thing he was proudest of in all the world: a son, Shanon, born in 1973, barely over five pounds. Years later, when Shanon came to him as a grown man and told him who he was, John wrote that he loved him exactly as much as he had from the day he was born — not a word changed, not a thing taken back. In another draft he simply wrote, “I have one Son, a gallant boy.”

John Richard Casey died in Alton, Illinois, on December 1, 2023. He left behind thousands of pages — typed, handwritten, scrawled on mortgage-banking letterhead and the backs of Christmas scrapbook sheets — the work of a man who spent his whole life noticing things and refusing to let them go. This archive is his son’s answer to that: everything he wrote, gathered in one place at last, kept open and searchable so that anyone can walk in and meet him on the page.