Join Angie Austin as she engages in an intimate conversation with Tom Smith, the author of The Three O’Clock Calls. Unveiling the story behind tragedy-laden midnight phone calls, Tom reflects on his journey through grief, his unwavering faith, and the redemptive power of love. Discover how Tom’s experiences inspired him to write a narrative that not only confronts pain but also offers solace and hope to those suffering similar trials.
00:00:01 Introduction to The Good News with Angie Austin
Welcome to The Good News with Angie Austin. Now, with The Good News, here’s Angie.
SPEAKER 04 :
Hey there, friend. Angie Austin here with The Good News, and I am very excited that we have an author joining us that is really our cup of tea here on The Good News with Angie Austin. We are being joined by author Tom Smith, and the book that we’re speaking about today, one of his books, The Three O’Clock Calls. Welcome, Tom Smith.
SPEAKER 01 :
Thank you so much for having me, Angie.
SPEAKER 04 :
You and I were discussing your faith a little bit before we started, and I know you’ve written children’s books, and this is your first book that’s not a children’s book, and that you’re a little dog. You’ve got a pretty popular book regarding your cute little dog. But tell us first just a little about you and about your faith, and then we’ll get into the book and get a little more in-depth.
SPEAKER 01 :
Sure, sure. Well, I’m sitting here in sunny North Florida right now at about 95 degrees. So born and raised in Florida, you know, not a transplant, actually a native of Florida. And so raised here in the Bible Belt, as you would say, in a Baptist church. I have a godly mother. We’ll talk about my father a little bit in the 3 o’clock calls. He’s one of the… characters in the book. But I was born and raised in a Baptist church. Been married to my wife, Nora, who is a godly woman of 40 years. And we have two children. And one is in the book. She’s now deceased, but I still feel like we have two children. And, yeah, we’re pretty active in our church. I’m a deacon at the First Baptist Church of Middleburg, and that just means we serve our pastors in the ministry of going out and an extension of what they need us to do with shut-ins and folks that’s sick and folks that need some encouragement or some help. And we kind of try to come alongside of our pastors and support the church and congregation in those ways.
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, I love that, Tom. Or you told me that you switched over from writing the kids’ book, felt called to write a book to help others who’d had losses and suffering pains. You mentioned the loss of one of your children, but you felt you weren’t equipped, that you’re like, you know, hey, God, you know, I wrote these kids’ books, but really like a regular book for adults to read? I don’t feel like I’m up to that. How did you feel led after you kind of expressed those concerns about writing this book, The Three O’Clock Calls?
SPEAKER 01 :
Yes. You know, so I don’t know, and that’s one of the things I think that sometimes we never feel good enough. We don’t feel it in times that, you know, the Lord won’t give us more than we can handle. We know that through Scripture, and still we have to be reminded of that. I said, you know, I said, Lord, I write children’s books. I don’t write adult books. And he says, you’ve got the material and you’ve got the ability, and I’ve given you the opportunity to do that. And he did. And so we had to question it, and then I thought, you know what? I’ve kept some memoirs of my loved ones through this tragedy, and I just had to gather my thoughts and collect it in such a way that we kind of put it together. And the Lord said, you know, Tom, you read The Shack from Cover to Cover by William Young, and that was a deeply moving book for me at the time that I needed it in 2008. And so he reminded me of that format. And so we set the format up with a three o’clock calls like William Young did The Shack, where I take the readers through the character’s going back and forth between the chapters instead of just taking one character throughout the whole series of chapters. So my little book, Angie, is 10 chapters. It’s 40,000 words. It’s an easy read, I’ve been told. Most folks read it in two hours. And, yeah, I’m just hoping it is out there that will encourage others in whatever they’re going through.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, let’s talk about the inspiration for the 3 o’clock calls and what it’s about.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay. All right. So, Um, the original title that I had for this book was called, I was going to call it our last conversations. And then I thought, well, that would be pretty obvious what that was about. And the three o’clock calls came to me because I took all three of these tragic calls at three o’clock. And I got to tell you, Miss Angie, anybody that’s ever had a three o’clock call, you’re, you’re hoping, you’re just hoping that it’s the wrong number. And then all you’re going to do is you lose some sleep and go back to bed mad because when you have a three o’clock wake up call and, uh, it’s not one of those you know, misdirected calls, you cannot hit the snooze button and go back because now you’ve taken a call that’s pretty messy and pretty deep. And that’s what’s happened to us on three different occasions.
SPEAKER 04 :
Three occasions. Okay, continue.
SPEAKER 01 :
The first call, George, the reader’s going to learn that he’s my father. And I don’t reveal that in the first part of the book. I kind of reveal how my relationship is with these characters at the very end. But George was my father. Okay. So a little bit of a spoiler alert here.
SPEAKER 04 :
I have to say, when you say there’s a little bit of a spoiler alert, I have to say my daughter is moving to the Bible Belt. She’s going to school in Tennessee at a Christian college. And when you say spoiler… It’s just like – I mean, it just endears you to me because I love that Southern accent. Nothing like a spoiler alert.
SPEAKER 01 :
Most folks are probably saying, what did he just say? But, yeah, and so we kind of give away a little bit here on this show here. But so George was a hard man. He was born and raised here, an alcoholic, never could – you know, with his addiction is most people that emailed me can relate to a parent or a sibling or a loved one that has an addiction. Well, George took his first drink at 12 and my father helped his father make moonshine moonshine now.
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, your father helped his father make moonshine. Okay. I got it.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay. I got it. Okay. Obviously my father’s telling me the story, how he first began drinking. So he took his first drink at 12 and, and he said son i never thought when i took my first drink i was taking my first drink on a road to becoming an alcoholic and uh you know they typically don’t admit that my father admitted that in his last days he was a strong man and a proud man and he was a violent man when he was drinking angie and uh we was raised in domestic i have to i have to say a couple things you’re saying they’re like we’re deja vu to me because my father has his phd he went to law school um
SPEAKER 04 :
He is, it was a professor, but he also, we were estranged for 35 years. And I remember sitting in the car with him and he said, would you like me to tell you how I became an alcoholic? I was at a party with my friends. I was a teenager. I took one drink and that was that I could never stop drinking. And so when you say that, it just, you know, he never thought that that would be like the end of life as he knew it. And your father, 12, same thing. Like they never knew that it would change the course of their lives.
SPEAKER 01 :
never knew it, and that’s the risk you take when, you know, you do those things, and he never could get rid of it, and as a result of that, you know, the alcohol made him violent, and we was raised in domestic violence, my sister and I, and my poor mother, she just thought she could change him, and she couldn’t, and she got battered pretty convincingly over the years, and my sister and I, it would get so bad, we’d hide in the closet, you know, and it’s pretty sad that Here I am in my 60s, and I can remember that like it was yesterday. You traumatize at that age because you know your mother’s getting beat up.
SPEAKER 04 :
Tom, I had the room next to my parents. Hardly anybody’s ever told a story that I relate to this much so quickly. I had the room right next to my parents, and there were three boys and myself. But when I was six, we moved into a house where I was next to them. So it’s terrifying when you hear, because my father was also a violent drunk, and to hear your mom through paper thin walls being beaten in the middle of the night and you can’t do anything and you can’t go to sleep and you’re staring at the ceiling with your eyes wide open, it’s a horrible feeling. No wonder the two of you hid in the closet.
SPEAKER 01 :
We did. My father and my mother would tell us to hide because she didn’t know what he was going to do. And my mother would come get us. He’d be passed out, and she’d be all bloodied up. And I still have those visuals to this day. So my sister didn’t have much to do with my father is where I’m going with that. And I kind of did. I knew that my father… had a problem. I felt like it was an addiction, a disease that he really struggled with. And so I kept praying for my father. Angie, I kept ministering to my father no matter how many times he said, son, I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear it. I said, dad, I’m praying for you. And I would. I say, Lord, please take this addiction from my father. Please make my father less violent. Please. please, you know, allow my father to find you, and we did that, and so this three o’clock call, fast forward, is my dad had gotten so many DUIs, they called them DWIs back then, Angie, he had about six of them, so the state of Florida revoked his license where he could never drive again, so I get this call at three in the morning, I’m thinking, this is the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, and you’re the son of George Smith, and I said, yes, sir, what’s he done now, and I’m thinking, he’s been drinking and driving and knowing he’s supposed to be driving. He said, well, Mr. Smith, uh, your father’s being booked for murder. And, uh, I sat up in bed at that time. Uh, it got my wife’s attention. She’s on full alert. And I said, I’m sorry, what? And, uh, just to share with you and the readers that, uh, He had been drinking and on a two or three day drunk, we called it. And he got in a argument, which became heated and a 12 gauge shotgun was involved in his front yard with his drinking buddy. And my dad ended up shooting the gentleman point blank range and the police arrived and they gave my, the police a dying confession that my father did in fact shoot him. And my father was incarcerated and booked for murder. And that’s, that’s something that I had to share in the book that I wasn’t really proud of. Nobody wants to put that kind of personal information out there, but I felt like that, you know, it’s real. It’s my life. You know, we live in a broken world and everybody has, you know, the life is kind of messy and, But I also wanted to share that in life as we suffer, you know, that life happens and we live in a broken world. And our call to understand that is that we still can have the courage to continue and the faith to keep going on. And so I went and picked my father up after years of incarceration. When he finally got out, the victim didn’t have any family and their blood alcohol level, they had both been drinking tremendously. And so they dropped my father’s charge to manslaughter, which reduced his time. And do you know when I, Went and picked him up and got him out of incarceration. The first thing he wanted to do, Angie, was go get a drink. I said, Dad, you’ve got to be kidding me. You’ve got to be kidding me. I knew it. He drank up those last days until alcohol destroyed his body. He gets put in the hospice. They tell me he’s got three days to live. My mother and my sister, we gather around him. We started praying. And before my father’s faculties got impaired from the morphine, I was able to share the gospel with my father. He was very remorseful. He was tearful. He said he wished he could do his life over again, and he was very apologetic to all of us. We were all crying around his bed. He was crying as I held his hand, and we kind of shared the Roman’s road with him, and my father prayed to receive salvation. And three days later, Miss Angela, he passed. And so I told my father, I said, Dad, The Lord will take you right where you’re at. You don’t have to do anything but just accept him. He’ll take you right now. You don’t have to try to make your life something that it’s not because my dad lived his life the way he wanted to.
SPEAKER 04 :
Wow, and so he was able to accept the Lord right at the end?
SPEAKER 01 :
Right there at the end, I get chill about sharing the story because I tell you the power of the gospel. And as I told you, Angie, I never give up. And so somewhere in there, just perseverance. And it reminds me of the verse James 1, 12, where it talks about blessed is the man who perseveres and through trials and different things. And my point is not that I’m anybody special. Everything, you know, has been done through the strength of Christ. And I just kept praying for my father and praying for my father. I said, Lord, do you hear me? Is my father always going to be an alcoholic? Lord, have you abandoned my prayer? I mean, now my father’s committed murder. And I wanted to give up. I kept thinking, where is God in all this? And right there, right there at the end, with three days left, the Lord blessed us with my father’s on his free will, accepting Christ as his personal Lord and Savior.
SPEAKER 04 :
You know, again, this is so crazy to me because my dad had a student who was one of his, who became like a son to him, who was a Christian, who tried to get my dad into the Christian faith all decades, maybe 40 years. And anyway, he wrote me up a very long, detailed message about how when my stepmom left the room, he was finally able to asked my dad if he wanted to accept Christ as his savior right before he died. And he whispered very clearly, yes. And so he did the very same thing in his deathbed. But the only reason his friend was able to do it because my mom and my stepmom and my dad would never allow him to. And he knew that he had to wait for my stepmom to leave the room. All right. Don’t go anywhere. We’re going to continue our conversation. If you’re just joining us, it’s The Good News with Angie Austin. We’re talking to Tom Smith, author of The Three O’Clock Calls. We’ll be right back.
SPEAKER 03 :
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SPEAKER 04 :
Cheyenne, Wyoming is tuned to the mighty 670 KLT Denver. Hello there, friend. Angie Austin with The Good News. Welcome back. We are continuing our conversation with Tom Smith, and we’re talking about his book, The Three O’Clock Calls. He’s written children’s books, but he got these three, three o’clock in the morning calls. And you know when that phone rings, that feeling of dread, because you know no one’s calling at three o’clock with good news. So you hope it’s the wrong number, as Tom said. And he received a call about his father being arrested for murder. His dad was an alcoholic, and He shot someone, and Tom got that call in the middle of the night, and he was there with his wife. And he’s talking about how at the end of his father’s life, his dad accepted Christ, like right at the very end. And, Tom, that’s an amazing thing to me when that happens because you explained to your dad that, like, look, we’re not making up for you. We’re not talking about what you’ve done in the past. What we’re trying to do is, like, this moment right now, you can actually accept Christ as your Savior regardless of what you did all these other years.
SPEAKER 01 :
That’s right, 100% correct. And I said, Dad, you are forgiven because of the cross.
SPEAKER 04 :
and i said the same thing happened with my dad we had very similar fathers i think okay so your dad and his dad made moonshine your dad became an alcoholic started drinking at 12 so that’s your first three o’clock call are you ready to move on to some of your other your other two three o’clock calls absolutely let’s talk about danielle she’s the next character uh angie and uh this is probably the one not that the george didn’t hurt this one stings pretty hard as well
SPEAKER 01 :
Uh, this is, uh, Danielle. She was our oldest daughter at 19 and, uh, man, such a free spirited kid. Um, this, this girl had all the life ahead of her and, uh, she basically had gotten a scholarship to go play golf. And, uh, so she went to university, uh, here in Florida, about six hours away. And, um, we, uh, was so proud of her and, uh, she had, uh, started her collegiate career and, um, basically, uh, had uh moved away and uh we were so excited for her to get a scholarship until she left and her mother and i said you know uh we was excited about her going to college but we’ve just recognized our our babies left us and uh any parent that’s had a child leave to go to college and realize hey uh it just changed everything at home you quickly hit rock bottom and thinking oh how sad this day is as well and that’s what happened when we dropped we dropped her off at college and so uh This call came at three o’clock and she was supposed to have come home and she never made it home. And I had spoke to her that day and she said, dad, I’m coming home. I’ve got the weekend off, believe it or not. And then I’ve got to get back. And I thought I’d come home and pick my sister up, which we have another daughter, Kayla, who was eight years younger and that pick her up from daycare. And then I’ll meet you at the house and we’ll just hang out. And I said, sure. And I got off a, I took that call that day at work, and I said, all right, I’ll see you when we get home, and we’ll go from there. And she never made it home. I got home late from work, and the house was dark, and Kayla wasn’t there. And my wife, by the way, Angie, was away at a conference. She was in Savannah, Georgia. hours away, and because she’s in a conference, her phone wasn’t on, so I tried to call Danielle. Where are you, kid? Thought you were supposed to pick Kayla up. This ain’t like you, so I called the daycare, and they said, Mr. Smith, Kayla’s still here, so I said, oh, my, so I ran to the daycare about 10 minutes away, picked up Kayla, and I said, Kayla, I don’t understand. Your sister’s supposed to pick you up at 7 p.m., and so we got home, and I started to try to call her. Her voicemail would come on, and I say, Danielle, where are you now? This ain’t like you. What’s going on? And I started calling some of her friends, and Mr. Smith, we ain’t heard from her. If we do, we’ll call you. And so I’m about not knowing what’s going on, and time goes by, and we end up getting a call. And it was the hospital in Tallahassee. She had made it halfway before her car had left the roadway because of pouring down rain. Her car hydroplaned and flipped upside down. into the woods, and fortunately, a vehicle had seen it happen, and Tom, FHP, and rescue had got there. They were able to pull her out and get her to trauma, and we get the call, and I said, oh, my, yes, I’m the father of Danielle Smith, and they said, well, has FHP been by there? And, you know, I knew what that meant. That’s never good if the Florida Highway Patrol is coming to see you, and so I said, they have not. What’s going on? And they said, well, Your daughter’s been in a horrific accident. And I said, is she alive? And they said, just barely. So we get Kayla and myself, and we start headed to the hospital as fast as we can. It’s two and a half hours away in Tallahassee. We’re in Jacksonville pouring down rain. And we get there, and she lasts for about eight hours. And we finally get her mother, and this is where it’s so important to have a church family. Our pastor and some deacons went to go pick my wife up so she didn’t have to make that drive because I hadn’t been able to get in touch with her. And, uh, they bring her there and, uh, my, my, my daughter’s on life support and, uh, she’s, he’s fighting for life and the surgical team had told us that, listen, um, it’s bad, but, um, you may have to make a decision and me being, you know, not understanding that the severity of it all. I said, what do you mean? Well, if you want to keep her on life support or not. And I said, Lord, I want whatever the Lord wants. And I fell to my knees thinking, Lord, I don’t want to make this decision. And it wasn’t, but it seemed like minutes later that the team come back out, and I’ll never forget how they said it. They said, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, you won’t have to make that decision. Your daughter’s heart just expired on its own, and she passed. And we went to the waiting room, and by then, you know, friends and church friends and family had showed up, and we all had a moment together. And the book goes into a lot more detail leading up to this and then after this, the way the Lord had his hands in every part of this, every part of this. You can’t see it when you’re in it, Angie, but when you step back, the book is going to reveal details about this situation that I would hope the reader would say, oh, my gosh, that is just amazing. And I will tell you this, any parent that’s lost a child, you go to bed at night and you wake up For a brief second, you think, I’m so happy to wake up from this nightmare that I just lost my kid. And for three seconds, you have just a moment’s relief only to recognize that, no, it’s not a nightmare. I’m waking from a nightmare into a nightmare because this is my life. We did lose a kid. And I cannot tell you as a parent how many times you wake up into that year after year. Even as Christians, in the faith that we had, we had to lean into it very, very hard to Because when grief strikes this close to home, it really does, you know, test your faith. And that’s when you know if you have real fundamentals and you have a solid foundation for your faith, because it is a very difficult thing to go through, Angie.
SPEAKER 04 :
Unbelievable. So your daughter was a freshman at the time, am I right, with the scholarship for athletics for golf when she was killed in that auto accident?
SPEAKER 01 :
That’s right. She hydroplaned it. Thank the Lord it won. It was only a single car, and nobody else was involved. You know, there’s all kind of little miracles in there and praises even through the tragedy.
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh. All right. So we’re speaking. If you’re just joining us, I have a freshman leaving for college in days. She has an athletic scholarship and we’re headed down to the Bible Belt. I think I told you she’s going to school at a Christian college in Tennessee. So we’re leaving her soon. So everything you’re telling me is just like really hurting my heart because your childhood reminds me of my childhood. You know, the children’s ages and just the three o’clock calls are terrifying to me. OK, so then you had another three o’clock call. And these are the calls that prompted Tom Smith, who we’re speaking with, the author of the three o’clock calls. These calls prompted him to write the book. OK, so what’s the next call? I’m afraid to ask.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yes, this next call happened in 2020. And this was my sister’s son. His name was Blake. And man, this guy had all of life ahead of him. uh he was in his early 20s uh he actually uh worked at the same place that i worked at and um young man that i had been pouring into my nephew my sister had three children i had two so we’re don’t we’re not like we’re from gigantic families and then at three in the morning i get a call and i see that it’s her and i’m thinking oh my and i said tanya what is it and she’s just but just just crying on the phone, just in a bad state. And I said, what is it? She goes, Blake’s been shot. Blake’s been shot. And I said, I’m coming right over. And we’re again set up. My wife and I, we grabbed our clothes, and my sister lived 45 minutes away, and off we went. And what happened to Blake was, being a young man, and he was a But as most young people, you know, they still like to experience life. And he had went to a club with some friends. And at 2 in the morning, they had gotten out, and he was in the parking lot talking with his friends. Well, one of his friends had gotten into a skirmish, and it got heated. and Blake got word, and he ran around to the backside of the parking lot and tried to defuse the situation, got in between the two people that was fighting, pushed him apart, and said, let everybody just calm down. Let’s just go home. Well, his friend wouldn’t quit agitating it and inciting violence, and so the other party grabbed a firearm and a pistol, and Blake was trying to say, look, he’s drunk. I’ll take him home. I promise you I’ll take him home, and the guy kept running his mouth, and so the suspect kept trying to get a beat on the, uh, person he was fighting with, with the pistol and Blake stepped in the way when he fired and just trying to defuse the situation. And then, and it hit my, it hit my sister’s son, Blake, right in the head and it dropped them right in the parking lot. And so that happened when, uh, you know, my sister gets word. And so now we’re at her house and this all just happened. And, and so I, I’m, I can’t believe we’re going through this as a family and I can’t believe that my poor sister’s having to deal with this. And so this is in 2020. Now, you know, COVID comes shortly after and that delays the trial because they catch, they catch the suspect two weeks after they, they catch them and he turns himself in. He recognizes that, you know, what he’s done. And now it’s, it’s taken four years because of COVID and our judicial system to go to trial. And so my poor sister’s got to relive all this again in the courtroom. And, uh, of course they tried to, they tried to claim self-defense and they tried to claim stand your ground and they tried to claim accidental shooting and the jury wouldn’t have, wouldn’t have a none of that. And so, uh, he got convicted as charged. And, uh, I just sat there with my sister in tears as I was writing the last little bit of this book in that courtroom and, of how this thing would end because I had the manuscript roughly put together, and then who knew it would take four years for a trial. And so the little book here came out in August of – I mean, the trial was over in August of 2024, and we was able to get the book out in December of 2024.
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, my goodness. These calls. You know, I don’t mean to tell you that we’re like twins, but my brother was trying to stop an argument in Boulder, Colorado, where my son’s currently going to college, where I went to college. My brother wasn’t in school, but he was stabbed to death right across the street from campus. He was living in an apartment building. And he also was trying to get the guy to stop kind of roughing up his girlfriend or beating up his girlfriend or getting aggressive with his girlfriend. So he kind of got in between them. And it ended up that this guy then later on in the course of this night, grabbing a knife and stabbing him right in the heart, dragged him outside and left him in front of the apartment building with the help of some of the others at the party who were never charged. And they also made an arrest almost right away. And he admitted that he did it. He didn’t want his girlfriend or his girlfriend’s little girl who was there He didn’t want anyone else to get in trouble that had helped him drag the body out and such. So he said, I want to take 100 percent blame for this so no one else gets in trouble for doing this. I just want to make sure people can find you, Tom Smith. The book is The Three O’Clock Calls. Tom, being a very strong Christian, talks about how he got through this. I’d like to have you come back and then we’ll talk about life after The Three O’Clock Calls and how the Lord helped you get through all these calls because we’ve covered the calls. But now we want to cover like how you got through it, Tom. What’s the best way for people to find you and your books?
SPEAKER 01 :
So 3o’clockcalls.com is my website, but these little books are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but Amazon, Softcover, Hardcover, and eBank. So they’re available.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, it was a pleasure talking to you, and I can’t wait for our next interview to talk about your journey through all of these calls. Thank you, Tom. Thank you. God bless you.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thank you for listening to The Good News with Angie Austin on AM670 KLTT.
