The next few days will mark a busy Alumni Weekend for John Niblock, a member of Monmouth College’s Class of 1958.

“We’re expecting a good turnout from our class,” said Niblock on Friday morning, just minutes after reuniting with some classmates for the first time in 50 years. “I was on the calling committee, and I think we got a good percentage of them to attend.”

For many, simply attending their 50th college reunion would be the highlight of their summer. But for Niblock, it might not even be his most memorable moment of the weekend.

In addition to reuniting with his fellow ’58ers, Niblock will also present two special programs on Saturday and will be promoting his first novel, “Danny and Da Mob.”

The 184-page paperback is a tongue-in-cheek suspense novel. Printed by Outskirts Press, the book is available for $9.95 at the Alumni Weekend registration booth in Stockdale Center. It is also available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Borders.

Set at Monmouth College in 1961, “Danny and Da Mob” is more than just a book. An adaptation of it will be performed as a radio drama on Saturday as part of Alumni Weekend festivities. Directed by assistant theater professor Janeve West and featuring the vocal talents of several MC alumni, the performance begins at 8 p.m. in the Kasch Performance Hall of the Dahl Chapel and Auditorium. It will be performed in the style of a live, old-time radio drama.

“I originally wrote a Cold War spy novel set in 1961, but it was rejected by 22 agents,” Niblock said. “So I decided to try something different with a lighter approach. With my 50th class reunion coming up, I decided to do a murder mystery based on that. My writer’s group back in California told me that having 70-year-olds commit the murders wasn’t believable, so I made it a 10-year reunion instead.”

The main character is Danny Molito, a comptroller for a printing company in Chicago’s Loop. He inadvertently stumbles upon a secret FBI listening post while trying to deliver a payoff to “Da Mob.” Both the feds and the hoods start looking for him. In disguise, Danny flees downstate to Monmouth College for Homecoming and his 10-year reunion. A tipster phones Da Mob with Danny’s whereabouts, the FBI overhears the call, and the chase is on.

The campus is roiled with mayhem and murder as thugs invade a seminar on Shakespeare, Chautauqua presentations and the Monmouth-Knox football game. Danny and his classmate Kitty, a Chicago lawyer, face a showdown with Da Mob, and the backdrop for the scene is a replica of the Iron Curtain, which was donated by an alumnus who was a former Hungarian Freedom Fighter.

“I changed names to protect the guilty, but people from the Class of 1958 will certainly recognize many of the characters,” said Niblock. “I used the school name, and I also tried to incorporate many Monmouth traditions.”

“As someone who comes from the ‘Get Smart’ TV show generation, I found this book totally captivating,” wrote one reviewer on amazon.com. “It is reminiscent of those popular scenes with Don Adams, the ‘Get Smart’ detective so seriously involved in crime solving, and yet so very funny as a less-than-perfect human being.”

Added another, “This is a charming book, which brings back my own past at a Midwestern college in immediately recognizable detail, yet astounds me at the same time with the foreignness of those times and people. Could we ever have been so innocent and silly, ever have cared about such outlandish marks of social status, ever have spoken straight-faced such dopey clichés?”

“I hope ‘Danny and Da Mob’ will be the first in a series,” said Niblock. “Toward the end of the book, Danny gets a call from a mysterious person in Las Vegas, and I’d like to follow the action out there.”

Earlier on Saturday, Niblock will help Monmouth alumni recall what the campus sounded like a half-century ago. At 10:30 a.m. in Wells Theater, an audiotape that Niblock and Charles Courtney ’57 made as students will be featured. Niblock will narrate a slide show and play the tape, which include President Robert Gibson giving a Vespers prayer and “Dean Jean” Liedman announcing a faculty vote allowing coeds to stay out until midnight for formals. Also on the tape are the steamplant whistle announcing a sports victory and Joe Tait ’59 doing the play-by-play for the Monmouth-Knox basketball game on WRAM. Tait is now a Hall of Fame broadcaster for the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers.

The Monmouth-Knox rivalry also played a big part in Niblock’s undergraduate days. He recalls being involved in the ill-fated “Mother Bickerdyke Raid” in Galesburg and spending “a night in the slammer” as a result.

An adventuresome spirit, Niblock said he also “ran two swordpoints into my right hand during rehearsals for ‘Brigadoon,’” and he has the scars to prove it.

Like his father, Charles Niblock ’24, before him, Niblock served as a reporter, columnist and editor of the Oracle, MC’s campus newspaper. Charles, whose parents graduated from Monmouth, was a track standout, participating on the two-mile relay teams that won the Drake Relays in 1923 and 1924. He later defeated four Olympians in a 1928 half-mile race at Chicago’s Soldier Field. Included on one of the winning Drake Relays teams was Charles’ older brother, Frederick Niblock ’23. In memory of their father, John Niblock and his two sisters provided the naming gift for the indoor track at the Huff Athletic Center in 2003.

Niblock’s early professional experiences were in journalism and public relations, including a five-year stint as the Monmouth College’s PR director from 1961 to 1966.

One story he remembers, in particular, was a lighthearted piece he wrote on Prof. Lyle Finley missing a class for perhaps the only time in his 36-year career at Monmouth. The wires picked up the story and, the next day, Niblock heard from a friend in Tokyo who had seen the story.

A few years later, while researching a report on the status of child care in North Carolina, he found that “60 percent of the operators said their care was merely custodial. Not enrichment, not learning, not anything. It really opened my eyes.”

His interest in children intensified, and the more he learned, the more he realized that his state’s children were in trouble. That interest led him to create the North Carolina Child Advocacy Institute in 1983, and he served as its leader for 12 years. He then served as president and CEO of the Alliance for South Carolina’s Children.

Niblock was honored with Monmouth College’s Distinguished Alumnus Award in 1996, and the citation said “he has been credited with new initiatives for improving child care, helping keep children safe and families together, eliminating corporal punishment in schools and finding permanent homes for more than 2,000 foster children.” Niblock also developed the first Children’s Index in the nation, a measure of the health and well-being of children that is now produced in all 50 states.

Retired from his child advocacy work for 10 years, Niblock has lived in California since 1999 and has returned to writing as his major focus. He writes regularly for Produce News, calling it a “one-third-time” job, and in his free time, he enjoys playing tennis and checking out local restaurants. He and his wife have been to 56 of Carmel’s 78 eating establishments, and the couple is looking forward to sampling the fare in Pasadena, where they’ll be moving in June.