While baseball was the center of his world in college, TJ Dailey needed to take some classes in his senior year in order to stay eligible for the baseball season. The classes led step-by-step to his recent, first published novel, “Pure American Nostalgia.”
Since he was doing stand-up comedy at the time, he thought a playwriting class would be fun, and it resulted in him winning an award for a play he wrote. He then took a screenwriting class and loved it.
He hoped to play professional baseball and do screenwriting in the off-season. As he trained for baseball, he realized after attending a few film conventions that the film industry wasn’t a good fit for him.
When he read Ray Bradbury’s book, “The Halloween Tree,” his career goals changed. “I didn’t expect much from a children’s book, but it hit me hard,” Dailey said. “It showed me how powerful stories can be, and I knew then that I wanted to write books that could move people in the same way.”
His book was inspired by Dailey’s earliest memories of his dad putting him to bed when he was a child and telling him stories about his own childhood in the 1950s and 1960s.
“As I got older, his stories shifted into real-life anecdotes, and I began to notice how TV shows and movies set in that era, Happy Days, Grease, The Sandlot, Back to the Future never quite matched the world he described,” Dailey said. “The cars and clothes seemed right, but the era felt boxed into stereotypes. The only thing that really rang true was the music. To me, those songs felt like windows into the past.”
For years, his escape from modern anxieties was to take evening walks with oldies playing in his headphones.
“Certain songs would paint scenes in my imagination, scenes inspired by my father’s stories, which gradually linked together and became the first draft of my book,” Dailey said.
He said that taking a step back while reading Pure American Nostalgia, might inspire readers to glimpse a diorama of real antics in real places, with people who truly walked the earth.
“There’s a sprinkle of me in there too - reflections of my own relationships and choices - but at its core, the marrow of the story is all my father,” Dailey said.
The story begins in the Northland and Gladstone and Riverside, and by the end of the book the characters find themselves back in the Northland, where it all began.
The book begins when a writer stumbles upon his old stack of 45 records and a wave of nostalgia and homesickness sweeps him back to the first night of summer in 1964, the night that set the course for the rest of his life.
“Determined to prove themselves as real hoods, he and his two best friends embark on a wild ride across Kansas City to witness the legendary hood Duke of Erle in a high-stakes drag race, where reputations are made and broken,” Dailey said. “But as the night unfolds, tensions ignite with jocks, thugs, and local rivals. Each chaotic, hilarious encounter escalates, leading to a final confrontation with a wannabe mobster, forcing the trio into a test of loyalty and an even greater realization. Beneath the adrenaline and wisecracks lurks the terrifying question every kid must face: ‘Who do I want to become?’”
After writing the first draft eight years ago, Dailey decided it wasn’t as good as he would like. “The bones were there, but the story felt like a mashup of ‘Stand By Me’, ‘American Graffiti’, and ‘The Outsiders’, missing that elusive ‘something’ that gives a book its soul,” Dailey said. “So, I shelved it for about five years.”
During that time he got married, traveled, and wrote other books, which he described as, “some bad, some average, and perhaps one worth reading”. Then his life shifted when his son was born. “Suddenly, the grind of adulthood settled in and a new part of my heart opened up,” Dailey said.
While researching the book, he learned a lot about the Northland’s cultural roots. His goal was to share the lived experience of the Northland’s history in a way that’s both authentic and entertaining. The book contains 75 local photos from the 1960s. Dailey dug through archives from all over the Northland and Kansas City area and the Library of Congress. He also reached out to local and online car clubs for photos of the vintage cars.
“I made sure to include every location that came up more than once in my research interviews, that way the story would feel like a forgotten memory for those who lived it,” Dailey said. “Readers who weren’t around then may not know the exact establishments, but they’ll definitely recognize the locations and facades of buildings still standing today.”
Many older readers have told Dailey that the book felt like a gift of memories, and they’ve thanked him for honoring the realism of that era while treating its people with kindness - flaws, love, and all. The photos have brought back many memories for readers, and Dailey is thankful he put so much effort into their restorations.
“I completely underestimated how time-consuming the restorations would be, especially since I had to teach myself every bit of the software. As far as finding the right photos to match the narrative, it was tedious, but I enjoyed how the puzzle pieces gradually came together and formed a whole picture.”
Beyond restoring the photos, formatting the book, and managing the covers and marketing, the most challenging part of writing the book was getting the historical accuracy right. He wanted every detail, from the way people spoke, to the appearance of old buildings, to feel authentic. He knew very little about cars, and spent weeks immersing himself in every aspect of pre-modern vehicles to make sure he captured them correctly.
Music is also an important element in the book. “At the top of every right-hand page appears a song title and its artist,” Dailey said. “In the prologue, the narrator discovers an old CD compiled from his collection of 45s. As he listens, each track stirs a memory from one night in 1964, and the story unfolds from there, guided by the music. To me, music has always been a window into the past. Unlike much of today’s output, shaped by AI and quantization software, the old songs carry a kind of magic. Analog has its own alchemy: electric currents flowing through wood, steel, and magnets to capture a force of pure expression, something others can feel in the same instant and decades later. That’s why so many of us find sanctuary in an old record. Of course, modern songs will hold meaning for today’s youth as well. Music, old or new, marks our memories like bookmarks in time. But does it carry the same magic? To my ear, no.”
He has ideas for more novels, and to combat the rise of AI-generated fiction, he’s decided the best path forward is to carve out a niche that can’t be easily replicated, stories grounded in real footwork, interviews, and human experience.
“To me, technology has eroded any sense of shared culture, and that loss is deeply damaging to how we connect with one another. When we no longer have common ground, we see only differences in the strangers we pass on the street. And as entertainment becomes increasingly tailored to the individual, through cold algorithms built on stolen training data, the divide will only deepen.”
He plans to expand Pure American Nostalgia into a series of standalone books, each rooted in a different decade of the Kansas City area’s history and enriched with genuine photographs. While not based on specific individuals, these stories will draw from the collective memory of the people who lived through those eras.
“Though fictional, I hope the series will grow into a vibrant, honest mosaic of Kansas City’s past, one that offers readers both sanctuary, entertainment, and connection,” Dailey said.
Planning, writing and completing the novel have taken years, but for Dailey, it’s all been well worth the effort.
“My dad was always the inspiration for this book, I knew that. But after having my son, I realized that a boy never truly understands his father until he becomes one himself. Under the weight of this epiphany, I pulled up the old manuscript and started rewriting. It took about a year to get the story the way I liked it, then another year to track down photos, restore them, and weave them into the final product. You never know how much time you’ll have with the people you love, and that truth weighs heavier as they get older. I’ve always believed you should tell them what they mean to you before it’s too late. In many ways, this book was my way of doing that for my father, and that, more than anything else, has been the most rewarding part of the journey.”