Theodore Taylor dies

Internationally known storyteller Theodore “Ted” Taylor died Oct. 26 at his Woods Cove home. He was 85.

Taylor’s three children, his wife and her daughter were at his bedside.

“He was at home in his own bedroom, which he wanted to be his final stopping place,” said Flora Taylor, his wife of 25 years. “The room was just bursting with love. You could feel it.”

Taylor died five years after his first heart surgery. A celebration of his life will be held in January, most likely at the Canyon Lodge at Ben Brown’s Golf Course Resort, where he and his wife often played golf, daughter Wendy Carroll said.

Flora and Ted met on Woods Cove Beach. She was a widow with three children. He was divorced, also with three children. They married in 1981.

Taylor wrote more than 60 books, most of them during the 46-or-so years he lived in Laguna.

He favored fast-paced narratives in his books for adults and young people. His style was spare, perhaps due to his early training in newspapers. He wrote both fiction and nonfiction.

He always said his children were the reason he actually began to write books, a notion he had considered for years.

Taylor was working in Hollywood in the early ‘60s, filming documentaries about making feature films, and commuting home to Laguna, where he told his children stories. They loved hearing about filmmaking. He thought maybe others would also be interested, and if he could pull it off it would mean the end of his daily freeway grind. So he wrote “People Who Make Movies.”

Then, in 1968, he spent three weeks writing “The Cay,” the story of 11-year-old Phillip, raised to dislike and distrust people of color. The young bigot becomes dependent on Timothy, an elderly black man, after they survive a shipwreck in which the boy is blinded.

He said it was the quickest and easiest book he ever wrote, but he had 12 years to think about it after he first heard, while working Puerto Rico, about a young boy lost at sea in the Caribbean during World War II.

Although honored for his body of work by the Southern California Council on Literature for Children and Young People, the George G. Stone Center for Books and the Kerlan Collection, and many awards for individual books, “The Cay” is the heart and soul of his literary legacy.

“It is one of those seminal books that never leaves you,” longtime Laguna Beach resident Ann Quilter said after learning of his death at a Friends of the Library dinner last week. “Whenever I read about a hurricane, I think of that wonderful black man cradling the young boy and saving his life. The book speaks about the humanity in all of us, that we must never give up trying to reach somebody’s heart.

“It was written so strongly and the characters are so alive, so meaningful, I think about it two or three times a year. Once you have read it, it owns you.”

“The Cay” is one of the most successful and controversial books in children’s literature, according to “Something About the Author, Vol. 128,” which Taylor delivered to this reporter years ago, to be used for his obituary.

When published in 1969, the book was hailed by readers and critics. In 1970, it was awarded the Commonwealth of California Silver Medal, the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award, the Southern California Council on Literature for Children and Young People’s Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, the Woodward Park School Annual Book Award, California Literature Medal Award and the UC Irvine Best Book Award.

But in the mid-1970s, the book was attacked as racist, with claims by some groups, including the now-defunct Council on Interracial Books for Children, that the black character was a stereotype of the subservient black man and was criticized for the use of a dialect. The Jane Addams committee rescinded their award.

“‘The Cay’ is not racist and the character of Timothy, the old black man modeled after a real person and several composites, is heroic and not a stereotype,” Taylor wrote in the “Something About the Author Autobiography Series. “Would the critics have had him speak Brooklynese instead of Creole? Nonsense!

“For every detractor, I have letters from black children who view Timothy as a hero.”

Charlie Quilter said the book teaches young people the value of diversity.

“It may have been one of the most important books my son ever read,” Quilter said.

More than 4 million copies of “The Cay” have been sold worldwide. It is required reading in many schools.

Theodore Taylor was born June 23, 1921, in North Carolina, the son of Edward and Elnora Taylor, and the youngest of their six children. One of his earliest memories was of hooded men in white robes carrying torches. His mother later told him that the men had burned down a black family’s home.

Ted was introduced to books by his mother. He obtained his first library card when he was eight, the beginning of a lifelong love affair with libraries.

“Ted has always been a major supporter of libraries, not to mention filling their shelves,” Martha Lydick, president of Friends of the Laguna Beach Library, said.

“I remember when the Orange County Public Library Foundation made him the poster author for the county in the early 1990s and how proud he was. What a gracious man.”

The Friends honored Taylor at their annual dinner two years ago for his contributions.

“I can never thank the Friends of the Library or President Martha Lydick enough for the recent gala in my honor; for placing my portrait by Don Romero in the library,” Ted wrote to this reporter at the time. “I’m so very lucky. With book number 60, most written in Laguna, on the horizon, publication next June, I’ve never felt so moved, so grateful. As I look at the portrait, I have to say, ‘Who is this old man at that antique typewriter?”

Best-selling author T. Jefferson Parker served as Master of Ceremonies at the Friends’ 2006 annual dinner, held Oct. 26, less than 24 hours after Ted died.

“This is a new Laguna, because there is no Ted Taylor in town,” Parker said. “What a lovely man.

“I loved Ted’s generosity. For the last 10 years, he would send me two copies of his books, one for each of my two sons.

“So in that spirit: Ted, I’ll miss you. Ted, I’ll miss you, again.”

So will Woods Cove residents, where Taylor was a familiar figure. For years, he was seen daily walking his dog down to the beach and back to their Catalina Street home.

When his book “The Maldonado Miracle” was filmed, Ted and Flora treated their neighbors to a private screening at their home. A giant screen was set up by the house, and chairs were arranged in theater-style on the sloping driveway.

A reception before the screening and a dinner afterward was held in the garden that is Flora’s pride and joy. All guests received copies of the reissued paperback of the book, and Taylor spent a considerable amount of time that night autographing them.

Taylor’s writing career began when the family moved to Virginia and he was offered the job of high school sports columnist on a weekly, the Portsmouth Star. He was paid 50 cents a week.

After delivering his weekly column, he would listen in on newsroom conversations. Taylor never attended college, which he often regretted. City newsrooms were the classrooms, reporters his teachers.

His varied job resume, compiled before he found his true niche, also includes stints as a boxing “corner man,” a brief stop as a copy boy with the Washington Daily News before he returned to the Star as sports editor, where he also worked the general news beat. His next step up the ladder was script writer for radio sports announcer Bill Stern.

But in September 1942, Taylor joined the Merchant Marines and the Naval Reserve. He was called up in 1944 as a U.S. Navy cargo officer. Seventeen of his books are about ships and the sea.

“The Bomb” came out of his searing volunteer duty on Bikini Atoll, where two atom bombs were tested after World War II, destroying the lives of the peaceful indigenous inhabitants.

He married Gweneth Goodwin in 1946. By that time, he was out of the service and was working as a sports editor in New York. He worked in public relations in New York, then moved to Hollywood, where he was employed as a studio publicist, a story editor, script writer and associate producer — until he began his true career as a writer of books.

The couple had three children before they divorced in 1979.

Taylor is survived by his wife, Flora; his daughter, Wendy Carroll of Fresno; sons Mark Taylor of San Diego and Michael Taylor of Mexico; stepchildren Patricia Killoran of Tucson; Michael Schoenleber of Sacramento; and Charlie Schoenleber of Carlsbad; grandchildren Christopher, Whitney, Caitlin, Sean and Ashley; and great grandchildren Nathanial and Adam.

No funeral service will be held, at Ted Taylor’s request. The family wishes memorial donations to be made to the Laguna Beach Friends of the Library in his name.