A poster advertises Jack Bales’ presentation at the Brookfield Reads program of the Brookfield, Illinois, public library.
Various research and writing projects continue to keep Reference and Humanities Librarian Emeritus Jack Bales busy. After his true-crime narrative and tale of baseball history, The Chicago Cub Shot for Love: A Showgirl’s Crime of Passion and the 1932 World Series, was published in 2021, he began presenting Zoom PowerPoint programs to baseball groups all over the country. Library organizations soon followed, including an in-person PowerPoint presentation and book-signing for the Quincy, Illinois, Historical Society in April this year. The public library of Brookfield, Illinois, selected the book for its 2022 Brookfield Reads program, and on Aug. 13, Bales spoke before local residents, answered questions and signed books.
Bales has published three books on southern author Willie Morris, and a week after his trip to Illinois, he was in Jackson, Mississippi, signing books and discussing Morris’s life and works at the Mississippi Book Festival.
Bales is an active member of the Society for American Baseball Research and is working on a Zoom program for SABR’s Nineteenth-Century Speakers Series. The title is “Beer Beats Them: The Chicago White Stockings’ 1886 Season and the End of a Base Ball Dynasty.”
Bales hosted the annual convention of the Horatio Alger Society in Fredericksburg in 2021 and 2022. He will host the convention again in 2023 and will present a PowerPoint program on Albert Payson Terhune, the author of numerous popular stories about dogs that were published in the 1920s and 1930s.