Former City Administrator DeLisle pens historical novel

During his tenure as St. Petersburg’s City Administrator, from 2014 to 2021, Alan DeLisle was a key player in many significant development deals, the St. Pete Pier in particular, of which he is justifiably proud.

DeLisle will be the first to admit he’s got nothing on James Otis Jr.

Otis (1726-1783) was a Massachusetts attorney, legislator and activist who helped grease the wheels for the American Revolution. Although he died before the Declaration of Independence was written, his fingerprints are all over it. In 1761, Otis all but spelled out the Bill of Rights, which wasn’t finalized and ratified by the Continental Congress for another 28 years.

DeLisle is the author of The Unforgettable Forgotten Patriot (Chapel Hill Press), an historical novel that tells Otis’ inspirational story, and cements his place among the pantheon of democracy’s founding fathers.

“I think he has been underplayed tremendously,” DeLisle reflects. “I didn’t know about him. Most people don’t. But the things that he did were spectacular, and ahead of most of our famous patriots.”

Samuel Adams considered Otis a mentor. John Adams (“Otis was a flame of fire”) and Thomas Jefferson sought his advice.

So why is he the “forgotten” patriot? “Everything kind of unfolded well after he stepped aside,” DeLisle says. “So the major events that we celebrate today don’t involve him.”

Mental illness – exacerbated, most likely, by a blow to the head in 1769 – kept Otis sidelined as things were heating up between the colonists and the ruling English (he was also a drinker).

This left a rather large void in the man’s researchable history. “John Adams,” says DeLisle, “left all kinds of documents behind. And Otis did not. In his bouts of confusion or loyalty, or trying to figure out if he was going too far which way or another, he burned a lot of his papers.”

Otis is best known for his stirring ’61 oratory arguing against Great Britain’s “Writs of Assistance,” which enabled government, police or other authorities to enter and search private homes at any time, for no reason. He is credited with the slogan “taxation without representation is tyranny.”

As the decade progressed, Otis became an outspoken critic of the crown. “Nobody else would dare to say the things that he said, in my opinion,” says DeLisle. “In court or in writing. When he wrote his first couple of pamphlets, he laid it out clear as a bell.

“And that stuff went over to Great Britain. Parliament and the King looked at it, and they were offended. More than offended, they were horrified that somebody would say these things.”

Yet Otis, whose wife was a dedicated Tory, was plagued by a nagging loyalty to Mother England. “Knowing his deep feelings for Great Britain, I knew that made it very hard for him to break sooner than most. Definitely sooner than Samuel Adams. I knew that he really struggled with this, and so it always made sense to me that with his bouts of insanity, in the middle of the night he must’ve been horrified of going against the King.

“I think he was struggling even before he got hit in the head. ”

The Unforgettable Forgotten Patriot fills in the blanks with logical fiction, based on knowledge of known events reported – in brief – in other Revolutionary War times. “They would mention him, and it would be a couple of paragraphs at most,” DeLisle explains. “But I was fascinated by his story.

“I did write it as nonfiction in the beginning, but I was just so frustrated with this in-between stuff that I went to historical fiction. So I was able to put my thinking behind what I thought happened, or how I thought it went for him.”

For example: “I wrote a couple of scenes that there was just no documentation for. The other books never really talked about his insanity. But the snippets that I read about his insanity … I knew that he had disrupted his neighborhood many times. There was a reference to him shooting a gun out of his window and startling the neighborhood, that sort of thing.”

DeLisle, who retired after a total of 35 years in state and local government, lives in Durham, North Carolina with his wife, Kim. He continues to work as a freelance development consultant.

The Unforgettable Forgotten Patriot is available through Amazon.