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The Old Man and the Sea

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

By 6:30 a.m., author Theodore Taylor is headed down to the bluff-hugging Laguna Beach coastline.

With his wife, Flora, and their yellow Labrador, he spends an hour early each day walking along the nearly deserted beach. “I like the peace and quiet, and in the winter there are very few people down here,” Taylor says during his stroll.

“I come to commune with the sea. It’s a good way to start your day is what it is.”

The sea has been a constant in Taylor’s life. In a literary career that spans five decades, the World War II merchant marine and Navy veteran has frequently returned to the sea as a dramatic setting for his writing--including the classic of children’s literature, “The Cay.”

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At 75, Taylor recalls vividly the first time he saw the ocean on a gray Sunday afternoon in 1932. He was 11 and watched, awe-struck, as a team of eight Coast Guardsmen launched an oar-powered wooden rescue boat into heavy surf off the Virginia coast.

Since that day, he has seen many seas, and the dramas that play out on them.

Often, they have provided the inspiration for his works of fiction and nonfiction for adults and youths. In the world of young adult literature--books written for children 12 and older--Taylor is a commanding presence.

Four million copies of “The Cay” are now in print worldwide. The award-winning novel about a young white boy who is forced to confront his racial prejudice when he is shipwrecked with an old West Indian black deckhand during World War II is on required reading lists for fifth- and sixth-grade students in 33 states.

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Published in 1969, “The Cay” continues to generate fan mail for the author. He sometimes receives as many as 500 letters a month from around the country--most of them arriving in batches from entire classrooms of students who have read the book.

Taylor recently returned from a tour to Chicago and Indianapolis to promote his newest young adult book, for which the setting, once again, is the sea.

“Rogue Wave and Other Red-Blooded Sea Stories” (Harcourt Brace) is a collection of new material and stories that originally appeared in Argosy and other magazines in the ‘50s and ‘60s. A review in the American Library Assn.’s Booklist describes the stories as ending “with the sort of punchy conclusion that characterizes the best short stories.”

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“Rogue Wave” is Taylor’s 51st book; more are on the horizon.

He is now in the middle of a fact-based novel about Jesse Leroy Brown, who battled extreme prejudice to become the U.S. Navy’s first black pilot.

“The ending of this thing will just tear you to pieces,” says Taylor, who wrote the original Navy press release when Brown was killed in action during the Korean War.

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Born in Statesville, N.C., in 1921, Taylor was 10 when his family moved to the Tidewater area of Virginia, to a village outside Portsmouth called Cradock. His father, an iron molder, worked at the Navy yard in nearby Norfolk.

They lived less than a mile from the Elizabeth River, and Taylor remembers hearing ships’ whistles at night. He used to fish for blue crab in the river and sell them for a nickel apiece.

The sportswriting job Taylor landed at 13 on the Portsmouth Star was a more satisfying way to earn money, and he continued working on the paper in high school. Unable to pass freshman math, which he needed to graduate, he dropped out in his senior year.

That was just as well to the 17-year-old Taylor.

“I was having too much fun at the newspaper office,” he says. “Back then, the news guys all worked with their hats on; they all had a pint of whiskey down in the bottom drawer; and they all had cigarettes hanging out of their mouths. I don’t think they were making over $15 a week, but it was just a romantic life and I thought, ‘God, I’d rather do this than go to school any day of the week.’ ”

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After leaving home and working as a copy boy on the Washington Daily News, Taylor returned to the Star as sports editor a few months before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Four months later, at 19, he joined the merchant marine.

After two years of plying the waters of the Atlantic, Caribbean and Mediterranean hauling gasoline and supplies to Allied troops, Taylor received his third mate’s license, which meant a commission as an ensign in the Navy.

Although he was tempted to stay at sea after the war, he returned to newspapering. He was a reporter for the Orlando Sentinel-Star when he was recalled into the Navy after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950.

Working as a press officer in the “bowels of the Pentagon,” he spent nights and weekends writing his first book, “The Magnificent Mitscher,” a 1954 biography of World War II carrier group commander Adm. Pete Mitscher.

While serving as a public relations officer for the Navy, Taylor met producer William Perlberg, partner of Academy Award-winning director George Seaton, who was in Puerto Rico filming “The Proud and Profane” with William Holden.

In 1955, Taylor moved to Hollywood to work as press agent for Perlberg and Seaton’s production company.

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Taylor, his first wife, Gweneth, and their three children moved to Laguna Beach in 1961. Over the next decade, while commuting to Hollywood--or flying to far-flung locations such as Taiwan for “The Sand Pebbles” with Steve McQueen--Taylor continued writing books in his spare time.

“The Cay” was his first young adult novel.

As with most of his novels, Taylor based it on a real event.

While researching his 1957 nonfiction book “Fire on the Beaches,” the story of German submarine warfare along the U.S. coast, in the basement of Coast Guard headquarters in Washington, D.C., Taylor ran across a brief account of a Dutch ship that was torpedoed in the Caribbean the first day of March 1942.

The torpedo sliced the ship in half.

“It was like a giant cleaver cut it,” Taylor recalls. “From the forward section was launched the single lifeboat, and into that lifeboat crawled the few survivors--eight or nine of them. They broke out the oars and they rowed a little ways away and they looked back at the after-half just in time to see an 11-year-old Dutch boy climb up on the after-rail.

“The boy plunged down into the water and swam over to a raft that had been launched by the impact of the torpedo. So he was seen to be safe.”

But the survivors, who included the boy’s mother, lost sight of him when the German submarine surfaced and blocked their view. By the time the submarine left, it was night.

By then, Taylor says, the boy had “drifted off into eternity.”

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Eleven years would pass before Taylor would write his fictionalized version of what happened to that boy.

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The character of the deckhand is a composite of West Indians Taylor sailed with during the war and an old man he drank and fished with in St. Croix in the Virgin Islands. The character of the boy is based on a kid Taylor played with while growing up in Statesville.

“The one thing I remembered about him was that his mother had taught him to hate black people and to hate them with a passion. Very seldom you’re going to find a kid 7, 8, 9 years old who has that kind of a hang-up. He had it. And I thought it would be an interesting situation if I put him on that life raft with a black man upon whom his very life would depend and then further complicate that life by [later] blinding the boy” as a result of an injury when the ship was torpedoed.

Having thought about the story for 11 years, Taylor wrote “The Cay” nonstop in three weeks in 1968.

The 137-page book, for which Taylor received a $500 advance from Doubleday, won 11 literary awards and was made into a 1974 NBC TV-movie starring James Earl Jones.

But “The Cay” has also been controversial.

The novel has been criticized for being offensive to blacks and for reinforcing racial stereotypes. Among the criticisms are that the black male character, Timothy, is described as a “huge” black deckhand whose “ugly,” scarred face initially terrifies the Southern boy, Phillip. The seaman is illiterate, speaks in a Creole dialect, and is seen by some as being stereotypically servile, calling the white boy “young bahss.”

The boy initially regards Timothy as inferior, but when the boy’s injuries cause him to lose his sight, he must depend on Timothy for survival. The two seek refuge on an uninhabited island. In time, the boy’s prejudices and feelings of superiority vanish as he learns to admire and respect the man for his courage, compassion and wisdom.

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In writing the book, Taylor’s hope was to achieve a subtle appeal for better race relations and more understanding. The novel, which he was writing when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, is dedicated to “Dr. King’s dream, which can only come true if the very young know and understand.”

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Lynn Eisenhut, children’s services coordinator for the Orange County Public Library, says the theme of “The Cay” and Taylor’s treatment of it “are basically timeless. He did a great job of explaining in that book to children both what racism is and why it’s a totally false belief and way to look at people.”

Taylor, she says, “is very well respected among librarians and teachers and others who are involved in children’s literature and work with children.”

In December, Taylor was notified that he has received the 1997 Kerlan Award for his body of work. The award is presented annually by the Kerlan Collection for the Study of Children’s Literature at the University of Minnesota. Since “The Cay,” Taylor has donated all of his manuscript drafts and editorial correspondence to the Kerlan Collection.

Responding to countless requests over the years, Taylor wrote a sequel to “The Cay” in 1993. Although “Timothy of the Cay” was well received, Taylor doesn’t believe it will achieve the classic status of the original.

By that, Taylor says he is humbled.

He’s not sure why “The Cay” endures.

“It’s just a simple message of understanding and love is what I think it is,” he says.

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With the exception of going fishing off the coast in a friend’s outboard motorboat and traveling--usually in connection with researching or promoting a book--Taylor’s days are spent writing.

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He doesn’t need hobbies, his wife says. There’s plenty going on right there at his typewriter. Each book, the author says, is an adventure.

Taylor says the support he receives from Flora is one reason he can write more than one manuscript a year: She reads his works-in-progress, helps with research and mailings, and keeps the financial records. “I still can’t add or subtract correctly,” he says.

Taylor and Flora met on the beach in 1977 when his dog “attacked her dog,” he says with a grin. Flora, a widow, was the librarian at El Morro Elementary School in Laguna Beach.

“I called her in the afternoon after she got home from school to apologize to her,” he recalls. Taylor, who was separated from his first wife, invited her out to dinner and to see the movie “Rocky.”

They were married in 1981.

The Taylors’ home, two blocks above Pacific Coast Highway, is a two-story, white board-and-batten house nestled in a lush, quarter acre grove of oak, sycamore, elm and eucalyptus trees.

The expansive garden is Flora’s domain; the office jutting out of the southern end of the house between two brick patios is Ted’s.

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A cozily cluttered room with windows on three sides, the office is part workroom, part Theodore Taylor museum.

On the walls are framed covers of his books, many of them now faded. In a row above a leather couch are black-and-white photographs from Taylor’s days in Hollywood in the ‘50s and ‘60s working as a movie company press agent, associate producer and behind-the-scenes documentary filmmaker: pictures of Clark Gable, Tony Curtis, William Holden and Frank Sinatra, along with photos of ships Taylor sailed on while in the merchant marine.

Taylor is at his desk by 8:30 every morning. Hyra always pads into the office behind him. Taylor got the dog as a puppy 10 years ago from a guide dog school in Northern California where he did research for his 1981 young adult novel, “The Trouble With Tuck.”

After taking a half-hour break for lunch, Taylor continues working until 4:30. Except for football season, when he watches college games on Saturdays and pro games on Sundays, he follows this regimen seven days a week.

Two books Taylor completed last year are making the rounds of publishers: an adult western and an adult nonfiction book written with Laguna Beach Police Chief Neil Purcell chronicling Purcell’s investigation in the 1960s and ‘70s of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. The Laguna Beach-based international drug smuggling organization was an offshoot of a drug-oriented religious cult founded by Timothy Leary, whom Purcell arrested in Laguna for drug possession in 1968.

It’s not unusual for Taylor to finish a book and begin a new one within a week.

“Many mornings I can’t wait to get here where I am, to sit down and go to work,” he says.

“I enjoy writing and I want to write and I do it.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

THEODORE TAYLOR

Background: Age 75. Born in Statesville, N.C.; has three children. Lives in Laguna Beach with his second wife, Flora.

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Passions: Writing, travel, fishing.

On the writing of “The Cay”: Having thought about the story for more than a decade, Taylor wrote what has become a children’s classic in three weeks in 1968. “It was the easiest book that I’ve ever written,” he says.

On why he continues to write: “Exploration, as near as I can describe it. I enjoy the twists and the turns. I’ll get into a novel knowing something about the beginning, knowing less about the middle and knowing nothing about the end. I don’t want to know anything about the end until I get there, and I hope I’ll be able to recognize the end when I get there.”

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