Moments in Time
An Autobiography, Sort of
By: Jack D. Smith

This set of vignettes is, in fact, a dot-to-dot autobiography. It’s warm, affectionate, diplomatic, and laced with kindness. In a phrase, a perfect reflection of the man his granddaughters know. And his friends and associates over the years. Now, so can everyone else. — Dr. Jerry Elijah Brown, former head of Auburn University journalism and retired dean and professor emeritus of the University of Montana School of Journalism.

Moments in Time is Jack D. Smith’s second book, written at the request of his two granddaughters, Maggie and Claire Smith. His first book, My Father the Ghost, was published in 2009.

Moments in Time describes the author’s most hated boyhood farm chore, by order of his dad, milking a stubborn old cow that keeps hitting him upside the head with her cocklebur-matted tail. He delights in the minty scent of plants growing along the shady banks of a fresh water creek – the little stuff that makes for the author’s happy young life in his beloved Mount Hope community.

But he also captures the dark valleys of his life, one of them waiting at East Alabama Medical Center on a morning when a doctor would arrive to turn off the life support machines for his wife. As a news reporter, the author invites you to join him in covering a midnight execution in Alabama’s electric chair.

These and dozens of other moments in time are written in a “sitting on the front porch talking” informality that Grandmother Smith and Aunt Eunice Rucker would have appreciated as they dipped Bruton snuff on the front porch of the author’s log house. You will meet some of the people who had an impact on the author’s life. Other than family, that lists includes a serial bank robber, a WW II prisoner of war, a man we called Mr. Bill, an angel in the journalism office, and others you will long remember, as will his granddaughters.