Philip D. Gallery

Phil Gallery brings to his latest work, Presidential Election 2020: What Might Have Been, a wealth of experience as a writer, naval officer, world traveler (having visited over forty countries on five continents), farmer, businessman, husband and father.

In 1946 Phil was born in Los Angeles. At ten days of age he was placed in the arms of his adoptive parents, and, in one way or another, has remained in them ever since. With his career naval officer father he bounced from coast to coast, changing schools eight times, until the family settled in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, in 1959.

From 1961-1963 Gallery served as a Page in the United States Senate, where he daily observed from close range a stellar array of senators talk to one another to figure out how to work together for the betterment of the country.

Phil graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1968 with an engineering degree in nuclear physics. He then spent five years driving warships over the world’s oceans, seas and gulfs. As a surface warfare officer, Gallery specialized in operations and navigation, with a sub-specialty as a deep-sea diving officer.

Upon finishing active duty in the navy, and having seen much of the world, Gallery decided to explore his native land. He moved into a camper and spent six months driving from San Diego to Seattle to Nova Scotia, ending up in Florida. His main discovery? He could have spent the entire time in Montana and not gotten to really know it or its people.

For the next several years Phil Gallery put pen to paper in an effort to discover if the pen really is more powerful than the sword. To put food on the table and gas in the tank, he spent the summers teaching naval engineering and operations at the Naval Officer Candidate School, planning joint military training exercises, or running the underwater radioactive waste removal operations on Eniwetok Atoll. Never figured out the pen and sword thing.

In 1985 Gallery and his family moved to West Virginia, where he and his wife raised four children, and, with their help, operated a Christmas tree farm, and developed an extensive Christmas tree retail operation in the Washington, DC, area.

During those years Gallery also wrote op-ed pieces for his county newspaper, The Hampshire Review, and had five children’s illustrated books published, four of which earned national “Best Book of the Year” awards. The award-winning books were: Can You Find Jesus? (1996), Can You Find The Bible Heroes? (1998), Can You Find the Followers? (2001), and Can You Find The Saints? (2003). He also collaborated with artist Sibyl MacKenzie in writing St. Francis and The Animals in 2018.

What’s left of him still resides with his wife on a West Virginia hilltop looking out over what’s left of the tree farm, and across a river valley to a distant mountain. Their children have scattered to the four winds and blessed them with three grandkids.