Author Stout finds his voice in ‘Buckle Up’

ALBANY — Salesman/author Lee Stour had his writing a-ha moment in an English class at Westover High School.

“I’d been on the Westover football team when we had a really good year — was one of the best third-stringers there that year — and then my senior year the team struggled,” said Stout, who now makes his home in Arizona. “But we had an English teacher at Westover who made us write, so I wrote a story encouraging my classmates to come to our games and support us. Attendance had dropped off after our successful year the year before.

“The teacher read my story to the class, and the reaction was very powerful. There was my a-ha moment.”

It was years later, though, after he’d forged a successful career in sales and sales leadership, that Stout turned that long-ago moment into a second “side career.”

And with the release late last year of his third book, “Buckle Up,” he’s established himself — through the telling of young Georgia high school football coach Nate Jackson’s compelling story — as a literary up-and-comer with tremendous promise.

Stout lived in Albany through his two years at Albany Junior College (now part of Albany State University), then transferred to the University of Georgia. In 1986, he finished his education at Georgia State University and started what would be a successful sales career in Atlanta.

Stout worked in Atlanta until the mid-1990s, went to Macon for a few years, spent a brief period in Jacksonville, Florida, then came back to Atlanta, where he worked for 18 years. When his son was accepted at Arizona State University, he and his wife, now empty-nesters, decided to downsize and move west.

They’ve been living “life in the Valley” for the past year and a half, but Stout says he and his Texas-born wife consider themselves Georgians and may make their way back east.

Stout did a bit of writing in college, submitted articles to Accent on Atlanta magazine, which at the time was edited by former Albany Herald reporter Charlie Postell. But it was not until he was in his 40s that Stout decided to give “real writing” a try.

“I’ve always owned English Bulldogs,” Stout said in a telephone conversation, “and when I’d personalize my dogs — have them saying things that people might say — people would laugh. So I sat down and wrote my first bulldog book. I had fun with it, and true to my word, all the money I made from sales went to a bulldog rescue group.”

The first book — “Hey Bully, Did You Really Do That?” — did well enough to lead to a sequel, “Bully’s Back, What Did You Get Into Now?”

“The first book did surprisingly well,” Stout said. “The second didn’t do quite as well, and that was a disappointment. But it was a great experience.”

With the realization that, yes, he could write a book, Stout decided to scratch an itch that had been gnawing at him since he was that top-notch third-stringer at Westover: write a football book.

“I’d always wanted to write something that would capture my experience on the Westover football team,” the writer said. “I played my senior year, and then my son had a similar experience playing at a small Christian school when he was in high school. There was a big difference in our experiences.”

But, as it turned out, the experiences of playing for a big-time powerhouse public school and a smaller private school wove their way into the story that became “Buckle Up,” which is set in Georgia. Stout’s writing skills include a keen eye for the magnitude of high school football in certain sections of the state and the geography and people in all corners of Georgia. Jackson’s story is a compelling one as he flirts with what could be disastrous moves after wrongly losing a job he’d been born to do.

It’s Stout’s telling of Jackson’s story — both the external quest to find a new job and the internal struggle to hold off demons and do what’s right — that make “Buckle Up” so compelling a read. (Warning for book nerds like me: The quality of the book’s editing are not up to par with the quality of the story and can be distracting.)

Now, the challenge for Stout, a challenge shared by all writers, is finding an audience.

“Everyone that I’ve talked to who read the book told me they loved it,” Stout said. “Now I’m trying to find the way to get the noise out there about the book. There are about 13 or 14 million books listed on Amazon, so it’s not easy. But I’m encouraged. I’ve discovered if you do something from your heart, with passion, it can make a more lasting mark.”

If you’re a football fan and an avid reader and you get the opportunity to read “Buckle Up” (I have copies here at the Herald that Stout has authorized me to share at no cost), by all means do so. It’s a story well-told and well worth reading. And, good news for Stout fans new and old, the author said he’s working on the outline for the next book in the series and hopes to have a follow-up done in 2020. I, for one, can’t wait.

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