By Kate Hill
Years before opening as a county park in 2018, the Delphi Falls property at 2006 Cardner Road in New Woodstock, was home to author Jerome Mark Antil.
The writer’s most recent work, “Tall Jerry: Legend One of the Delphi Falls Trilogy,” will be released on Thanksgiving Day 2019. The semi-autobiographical novel is a coming of age story set in 1953 in Cazenovia and the surrounding area.
Antil was born in Cortland in 1941 to Michael Charles Antil Sr. and Mary Holman Antil.
One of eight children, he is “the seventh child of a seventh son of a seventh son.”
According to Antil, his father purchased the Delphi Falls property from the county in 1938.
However, the family home was not built until several years later.
“During [WWII], they weren’t allowed to build new foundations and they didn’t have access to building materials,” Antil said. “There was just a pavilion [on the property], where my parents would throw free square dances on Friday nights. We would camp out in the hills and behind the falls.”
After the war, when Antil was 8 years old, his father converted the pavilion into a house, where the family resided until about 1970.
Antil remembered the post-war period as a simpler time, when small-town values mattered and the future seemed full of promise.
“The time of the subsistence farmer is in the past, but we lived in that environment, surrounded by farms,” he said. “It was a nice time to grow up.”
The Delphi Falls Trilogy is a series of novels based on actual events that occurred over the course of a single year of Antil’s childhood.
The author described the trilogy as a retelling of the stories of his youth. The title of the first book, Tall Jerry, is a reference to the considerable growth spurt that Antil experienced in 1953.
“Everything in my books is seated in the truth, and most of the characters are real people,” he said.
According to Antil, his writing style and process are inspired by the works of Ernest Hemingway.
“The more I write, the more I respect and learn from him,” he said. “Hemingway said ‘only write about what you know.’ . . . He also said ‘count your words everyday.’ That was his way of saying that writing is not a craft or an art; it’s a discipline. You have to [put in the] work.”
Antil is the author of 10 novels and the founder of the independent publishing house Little York Books (2010).
Before beginning his writing career, he served as a chief marketing officer for several prominent U.S. companies.
His first book was the product of a promise he made to his daughter to write a guide for fathers going through separation or divorce. The resulting book, “Handbook for Weekend Dads” (2010), sold in 11 countries and became an Amazon bestseller.
His second book, “The Pompey Hollow Book Club” (2011), is a compilation of stories about growing up in a dairy farming community in the shadow of World War II. In 2012, Antil was named “Writer of the Year” by Syracuse University’s student body.
Delphi Falls County Park opened to the public last August.
The 60-acre property, which is currently under development, includes two waterfalls, a house, a barn, woodlands, multiple parking lots and a handicap accessible trail that leads to the base of the lower falls.
“The Delphi Falls . . . are there for you to see today,” said Antil. “It’s all still magical, I promise.”
Antil currently resides in Dallas, Texas and South Hampton, New York.
He will return to Delphi Falls next summer or fall on his book tour.
For more information on Antil’s work, visit jeromemarkantil.com or email [email protected].
