My Year With The Bookmaker

Sometimes the people who save you are the ones the world has already counted out.

If you have ever been young, abandoned, and hungry, wondering where your next meal would come from, you know the kind of desperation that rewires everything you thought you understood about family. You know what it feels like when the adults who were supposed to protect you simply vanish. And you know that survival sometimes arrives from the most unlikely places.

In My Year with the Bookmaker, you will step inside the world of a sixteen-year-old boy left behind by his mother in the turmoil of the 1960s. With no parents, no safety net, and barely enough to eat, he finds refuge with his Uncle Mike, a fiercely loyal, physically disabled man who runs an illegal bookmaking operation out of Dayton, Ohio. Through vice squad raids, back-alley loyalties, and lessons dealt across a card table, Mike offers something no one else could: unwavering belief in a kid the world had forgotten.

This is not a story about gambling. It is a story about what happens when someone sees potential in you before you can see it in yourself.

Billy Harper DVM lived this story, rising from hunger and abandonment to build a career as a successful Doctor of Veterinary Medicine.

If you have ever wondered whether your circumstances define your future, or whether one person's faith can change the trajectory of a life, this memoir holds your answer.