Samuel W. Taylor: Talented Native Son

Samuel W. Taylor: Talented Native Son

BY JEAN R PAULSON

SAMUEL W. TAYLOR, UTAH-BORN WRITER and soldier, was facing two deadlines on a blustery October day in 1943 at Camp Shanks, New York. First, he and his ordnance company, along with thousands of other soldiers, were waiting to be shipped out to the European Theater of War Their departure was imminent.

The second deadline concerned a short story that had germinated in his head a few days previously and was ready to be set down on paper. But where? He no longer had the luxury of sitting down before his typewriter at home, some 3,000 miles away at 1954 Stockbridge Avenue, Redwood City, California.

Aha! The day room. There, by putting a dime in a slot, he could use the typewriter for half an hour. He did not stop to get change for fear that someone would get ahead of him, and he had a couple of dimes

For an hour, he concentrated on typing the story. He was about a third of the way through and the tale was coming to life when he heard noises behind him. Turning his head, he saw three GIs standing behind him, and all three were muttering to and about him

The typewriter went dead in the middle of a page.

"I'll give you a quarter for a dime," he said to the man behind him.

"No dice, Mac, I've got to write to my girlfriend before we get shipped. You've had your turn."

Sam persisted. "I'll give you fifty cents for a dime," he said, addressing all three men

"Get up and get out, Mac," the second soldier said.

Sam rose to his feet, hand still possessively on the typewriter, waving a dollar bill. He addressed the entire room. "A dollar for a dime!" No takers Reluctantly, Sam rose Well, he'd finish the story with a pen He sat down to write in his cramped hand. The pen went dry. But Sam had a pencil and a pocketknife, and he continued to write.

Then another obstacle presented itself. It was almost 10 o'clock and lights out The story still was not finished, so Sam went to the only place where lights were on all night and there was a place to sit, the latrine. He completed the story that night. The next morning, he smuggled the story out of camp to his agent in New York, who had it retyped and sold it to the Saturday Evening Post, where it appeared under the title, "Wing Man."1

The previous month, while stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington, Sam had completed a short story while intermittently working. "I finished it while I was handing out clothing and supplies to a hundred and forty men," he said.2 The two episodes illustrate what has characterized Samuel Taylor's long and illustrious career as a writer: the two T's of talent and tenacity. He began his writing career while a student at Brigham Young University, starting with short stories and later expanding to novels, non-fiction books, three-act plays, and screenplays. Through it all, he remained one of only a handful of American writers who never deviated from freelance writing to take even a parttimejob. He made it solely as a writer.

His death from congestive heart failure occurred on September 26, 1997, at his home in Redwood City, California. Samuel Woolley Taylor had been born ninety years earlier, on February 5, 1907, a son of John W and Janet "Nettie" Woolley Taylor Nettie, as she was called throughout her life, was the third of six wives of the colorful John W., and Sam was the twenty-seventh of his thirty-six children. Nettie, with eight children, had more than her share of the thirty-six.

Sam chronicled in his book Family Kingdom the life of one of John W. Taylor's six families—the union between his father and mother. John W. was one of the younger apostles in the LDS church during the late nineteenth century. He was a spellbinding orator, a fiery speaker who could electrify the Mormon congregations. He was also a speculator, a promoter, and a plunger. When he went into a project, it was with all his energy and optimism. Sam's mother and John W's five other wives were constantly on a roller-coaster ride with this charismatic man His interests ranged from land speculation in ranches and timberlands in Canada, to mines in Mexico, and to the development of towns and colonization projects. On two occasions he built mansions for Nettie and the children, but eventually the 'best homes in town' were lost due to economic setbacks, and most of the time the family struggled financially. The situation worsened in the 1890s when, in defiance of the civil law as well as a new church edict, he married his last three wives.3

John W was forced to resign from the Quorum of the Twelve in 1905 because of his disobedience to church policy From that point on, there was no need to hide anymore; no one was looking for him as a high church authority who was flouting the law. But he had spent years on the underground, duplicating the experience of his father, President John Taylor, who had died while in hiding from federal agents. The underground had been hard on John W.; the missed meals, inadequate medication, and stress eventually took a toll on his health. In 1916 he died from cancer at the age of fifty-eight. His young son, Samuel W., was nine years old.4

Sam, certain that he was the favorite of the thirty-six children, remembered his father fondly. Such was his father's charisma, Sam said, that each of his six wives considered herself John W.'s favorite, and none of the six remarried These were days of poverty for Nettie and the eight children, both before and after John W.'s death Few avenues of employment were open to women at the time, and after her husband's death, Nettie decided to open a boardinghouse. With a small amount of cash she received through an inheritance from her family in Tooele, she purchased the old Brimhall House at 365 North First West Street, Provo, a house that had seen better days When she went to inspect the property, she had no key to the front door, so she crawled through a rear window. She promptly went through the floor boards. "But we fixed it up," Sam wrote later. "I don't remember when we didn't have a hammer in our hands."5

Boarders were allowed to drink coffee, but Sam was not, and he said later that the aroma of coffee was so beguiling that he would slip out of the house, walk a few blocks to a Provo cafe, and have his coffee. He always held the cup handle in his left hand, since he did not want to drink out of the same side of the cup that the "Gentiles" used He drank coffee for most of his life and retained the habit of holding the cup in his left hand.6

During those earlier boardinghouse days, the Taylor children were introduced to work wherever it could be found. Sam wrote in his autobiographical book, Taylor-Made Tales, that his mother bundled him up in a large coat so as to make him look older than his years and larger than his under-medium size and sent him to the Knight Woolen Mills, one of the few industries in Provo at the time He got ajob that paid seventeen and a half cents per hour. Always capable around machinery, Sam soon was able to weave, run the cards, and spin "And when my wages were raised to 35 cents an hour, I was hard to live with."7

"'Spinning was the elite job in a mill, and I had that to fall back on in case the writing business collapsed. And you know what? They no longer use the spinningjenny. So where does that leave me?"8

In later years, about the time he entered Brigham Young University, Sam got ajob as bookkeeper and night clerk at the Roberts Hotel, then owned by Mark Anderson. This was the time that my lifelong association and friendship with Sam Taylor began. I had been elected editor of the Y News, the semi-weekly student newspaper, and brought Sam on as a reporter. He soon became a celebrity with his column, "Taylored Topics." He offered a type of writing the students had not been accustomed to, and neither had the faculty When he wrote about unusual occupations students pursued to pay for their education, including bootlegging, he was called before the Attendance and Scholarship Committee and asked to name the students who were selling bathtub booze. He refused and was suspended. After several other such incidents, he dropped out of school in his senior year. 9

Sam was known for his quick wit, and he also enjoyed a good joke or story. His laugh could best be described as a head-back guffaw, which always tickled his auditors. Hearing it, people around him would smile, chuckle, or even laugh out loud along with him. In those BYU years Sam and this writer, along with Glenn S Potter, Frank Whiting, Allen Stephenson, andJohn M. Taylor, formed the Pi-P writers club and met periodically to critique one another's work. The group all tried to outdo one another with puns or a play on words. Many a poor pun was hatched in that atmosphere.10

Sam had built what he called his office, a one-room structure, on his mother's property, and it was here that he started his full-time writing career He had sold his first article, "Are You Aberrant?" to Psychology magazine Shortly afterward he had an article published in Writer's Disentitled "How to Write Articles to Sell."

During his last year at college, Sam went into Dean Hoyt's office at BYU to borrow an adding machine. When he introduced himself, the secretary responded that she had been a devoted follower of his column since its inception in the Y News. The secretary was his wifeto-be, Gay Dimick Three years earlier she had won first place in the Elsie C. Carroll short story contest. While she arranged for Taylor to use the machine, he asked her name.

"Gay Dimick."

"Gay Dimick? I've been looking for you for three years!"

Taylor would later say, "And with that for openers, it only took five more years to con her into marriage."

Typically, Gay said later, Sam also said at that first acquaintance that he wanted to tell her what she had done wrong in her story. "It was part of his personality that he pointed out things that were wrong."11

After her graduation from BYU, Gay found ajob at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University By then, her romance with Sam Taylor was flourishing, and Sam later followed her. They were married in Palo Alto and settled into a house not far from her job. "It was a perfect location," Gay said. "I had only a mile to walk to work, and Sam had only a mile to walk to the post office."That was where, of course, he mailed his manuscripts and picked up any rejects or checks.12

The rate of pay for pulp fiction was low during the Great Depression, ranging from a half cent to three cents per word, so Taylor felt compelled to use all the time at his disposal. He was fond of telling of an incident that occurred when he and Gay were residing in Palo Alto Gay was entertaining a visitor in the kitchen, and during a pause in his writing he heard her say, "And that man in the corner with his face to the wall, pounding on his typewriter, is my husband, Samuel W. Taylor."13

He was writing then in a number of genres, for the pulp paper magazines were at their zenith. He wrote westerns, sports stories, action, mystery, and fantasies. He even tried his hand at confession tales—those "sin, suffer, and repent" stories so dear to the hearts of a certain segment of the American population. It was a hard dollar, and since the Great Depression showed no signs of letting up, it promised to stay that way.

One day Taylor made a discovery that was to change his life. He completed a routine story for Detective Fiction Weekly, one of his major pulp markets, but since that magazine had not yet reported on a previously submitted yarn, he sent the new one, "Memory Test," to Colliers. When it was accepted—at ten times the pulp rate—he learned a basic fact about the writing business. "The only real difference between a high-paying market and a penny-ante market," he would later say, "is the amount of money involved. Every market requires the best you can do."14

As a corollary to this insight, which came early in his career, Taylor went against the tide in his advice to would-be writers, advice he offered during his appearances as guest speaker at writing seminars and conferences. Many writers and teachers tell beginners to slant material for particular markets. Not Taylor. "Writers get too tied up in camera angles," he told participants in a meeting of the California Writer's Guild. "Forget style! Forget form! Go after those dramatic values! That is the secret."15

For Sam Taylor, the period of the late thirties and early forties was an era of prosperity. He could knock out a short story in a few days and sell it to Colliers or the Saturday Evening Post for a healthy fee. Serials brought in several times the amount paid for a short story, and later they could become books. Sam told me, "Colliers and the Post gave me $2,000 for a short story I could do in three days, Liberty, $1,500. Serials brought $13,000; book-length one-shots paid well."16

The dollar at that time might not have gone all the way across the Potomac, but it was worth several times what it is today. So now that sales to the slicks had improved their bank account, the Taylors found a two-and-a-half-acre parcel of land on which they could build and expand in what was then a rural area in Redwood City.

To most people, building a house means hiring a contractor, but not to Sam and Gay Taylor. Not only did Sam do most of the carpentry, plumbing, and bricklaying, but also the Taylors even made their own adobe bricks for the modest home Sam also learned how to set tile—no easy job. He became so fascinated with the craft that after laying the dining room floor he tiled several other areas not called for in the plans.

He had plans for an office about a hundred feet from the house, but the onset of World War II delayed this project for more than three years. In the early months after Pearl Harbor was bombed, there was great concern that Japanese submarines could enter San Francisco Bay. Even though a submarine net had been installed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge to catch any enemy submarines, it did not reach to the shore, and small mosquito subs would possibly be able to slip through close to the shoreline Taylor was called on to direct the installation of another net at the end of the bridge to protect the Bay Area from possible enemy attack by the Japanese mosquito subs He said, "I guess I was the only able-bodied man left in the area who could read a blueprint."17

Although Taylor was beyond the normal age for the draft, he was inducted into the U. S. Army in 1943. As a Private First Class, he received a base pay of $56 a month; this salary was augmented by his unusual skill at poker. Gay later said of that time, "We were short of funds, since we had just finished the house." She also said of his initial months in the army that "Sam was an enthusiastic soldier, and in no time at all was promoted to the rank of corporal, which paid $66 a month." His first duty station after boot camp was at Ft. Lewis, Washington, where he was assigned to issue supplies to fellow GIs in the 176th Ordnance Depot Company.18

The command saw him as officer material and sent him to Salt Lake City for a two-week period under the Army Specialist Training Program (ASTP). It turned out, however, that the ASTP had been discontinued, so Taylor and the other soldiers spent the two weeks marching on the parade grounds in close-order drill. His evenings, for the most part, were free. Gay said that he spent most of the two weeks doing research for an article entitled "The Dream Mine,"which appeared in Esquire and earned him $250. It was here that Sam made a decision on which would come first, writing or soldiering. Writing won. 19

When Taylor and his ordnance company left Ft. Lewis, they went on a troop train to a then-secret base on the East Coast, which we now know was Camp Shanks, New York. There they were joined by thousands of other soldiers also bound for the European Theater. The trip from New York to England was anything but routine. When the troop ship, the Andes, embarked on November 6, 1943, it was overloaded with 5,000 servicemen who were literally stepping over one another. It wasjust too many people for one ship, and conditions were deplorable. One group of men slept on the top deck; the only place they had to get out of the weather was the latrine, where a crap game was kept going for almost the entire voyage Taylor wrote to his wife saying that he had nightmares about the ship being bombed and going to the bottom of the Atlantic with all 5,000 men.

He also had trouble with the food Taylor was assigned to KP duty on one of the first days of the voyage. He noticed that the cooks used the same broom to stir the tea as they did to sweep the floor. After that he instantly lost his appetite. Normally, Gay said, "Sam could eat just about anything as long as it was clean and in small quantities." But "on the voyage, he subsisted mainly on Hershey bars," which, for servicemen, were three cents each.20

On arrival in England, Taylor was still in the ordnance company but longed to be where he could be writing most of the time. He once said he was in "a chicken outfit led by a chicken captain."21 He wrote a letter to the commanding general of the First Army, explaining to him why he would be of better service to his country in a public relations outfit. When he showed the letter to his captain before he sent it off, the captain advised him that it would certainly be rejected However, the letter went up through four layers of command and back down through four layers, with orders for Taylor to be transferred to the Army Public Relations Office.

By an odd coincidence, the Army Air Corps PR section was seeking a writer at that very time. Colonel Arthur Gordon, chief of the Air Corps Public Relations Office, had written to his friend, Carl Brandt, in New York City asking if he knew of someone who could fill such a position. Brandt just happened to be Taylor's literary agent. When both transfer offers came to Sam at the same time, the Army PRO gave Taylor his choice, and he chose the Air Corps unit. In February 1944 he was transferred to Gordon's unit, USTAFPRO (United States Tactical Air Force Public Relations Office). 22

One of Taylor's first assignments was to write a book, Fighters Up, with Eric Friedheim; many of the chapters of the book had been previously published as magazine articles in various periodicals The book sold well on the continent and to a lesser degree in the United States, but at least Sam's work did not go unnoticed, and at the end of the year he was asked to write the commanding general's report to the Pentagon. The report was so well received that he was asked to do the same task the following year. Completion of the book, the annual reports, and other outstanding work led to Taylor receiving the Legion of Merit, the army's highest non-combat decoration.

Taylor was soon made head of the magazine section.23 In this position, he went here, there, and everywhere interviewing pilots, GI heroes, generals, and anyone who had a good story to tell.

Taylor liked to say that the reason he received a field commission was that he had to interview both officers and enlisted men to carry the story of the war back to the United States, but an enlisted man had difficulty getting admitted into Officers' Clubs to conduct the interviews. However, the unusual honor of a field commission no doubt had been influenced by the fact that, in addition to the Legion of Merit and other recognition, he had been awarded three Battle Stars and the Bronze Star. His military record also showed that he had been selected earlier for the ASTP officer training program.

The day after Paris was liberated he and others ferried Ernest Hemingway, Mary Welch (who later married Hemingway) of Time magazine, Demaree Bess of the Saturday Evening Post, Drew Middleton of the New York Times, and a number of other well-known correspondents to Paris, where they were headquartered at the famous Ritz Hotel. The group's first luncheon at the Ritz was served up in firstclass fashion, in silver tureens. When they lifted the tureen lids, however, they found themselves staring at unappetizing cans of C-Rations. The "10-in-ones"—the army's best-quality field rations—had not yet arrived The writers called their experience "Camping at the Ritz."24

Sam was in his element in the Air Corps PRO. What an outfit! Its topnotch newspapermen and photographers included the chief, Arthur Gordon, who had been editor of Cosmopolitan. Taylor's roommate at a London apartment was the movie actor Ben Lyon, who headed the Radio Section. Sam rubbed shoulders at various times with Maurice Barrangon, Andy Rooney, and many other notables.25

The pursuit of one story almost cost him his life. He had gone to Paris for an interview and hitched a ride back to London headquarters in a plane transporting a general to England. But Biggin Hill airfield in East Anglia was covered with a heavy fog, and the plane smashed to earth, catching on fire. In giving details about this incident, Taylor said, "It's amazing what a person will do when death is staring him in the face I was scrambling around in that burning plane like an animal, trying to find a way out." Only two persons were killed in the tragic accident; both of them were ground crewmen who were in the wrong place when the plane pancaked in.26

Sam need not have worried. When he had joined the PR team he no longer was confined to a normal army barracks but found a place to live in London that had a charwoman to clean the room. The woman appeared to be conversant with spirits—a psychic. One day she said that he had a beautiful aura, that he had been born with a caul, and that he had a guardian angel She said, "You'll be safe, Yank; there are two people standing behind you who will help." He said he did not think much about the prediction until he walked away from that bomber crash.27

Those "two people standing behind" Sam had their work cut out for them. He came away from the war with five major decorations. He narrowly escaped capture—or worse—while visiting a bombed oil refinery near Strasbourg, which was behind the German lines. The bloodbath called the Battle of the Bulge swept bywithin three miles of his location—and at that time the Germans were not taking prisoners!28

Sam Taylor was always free with his suggestions, regardless of rank or position, Gay said. When the European war was in its waning months, he wrote a series of humorous stories, entitled "Take My Advice, Mr. President," that appeared in serial form in Liberty. Gay said she laughed out loud when she saw the title, which reminded her of an incident in California when she and Sam first saw the Golden Gate Bridge As they gazed at the magnificent scene, Sam said, "Now, what they should have done is. ... " She said his voice trailed off, and he added, "Well, I guess they did the best they knew how."29

"It wasjust a part of his personality," Gay said.

As the person in charge of the USTAFPRO Magazine Section, Taylor was able to arrange a trip back to the States for two weeks to confer with media representatives The Allies were nearing the final push to victory, and when Taylor arrived in New York City he discovered that returning soldiers were treated like heroes. With a chest covered wrth ribbons, he found that it was difficult to pay for his own bill at a restaurant. On one occasion, when civilians were making do with dry toast because of wartime rationing, a waitress brought him a piece of bread on a plate then bent to whisper in his ear, "There's a pat of butter under the bread, Soldier." Gay met him in New York, and they had a welcome reunion during his off-duty hours.30

On VE Day, Taylor and others were in the beer hall in Munich where Adolf Hitler had launched Nazism. Sam "liberated" a Nazi banner, with the staff and finial, which he later donated to the Hoover War Library at Stanford.31

After the close of hostilities in Europe and a cross-country rail journey from New York to his California home, Sam found two letters from the Pentagon that had been forwarded to him from his last post in Germany. General H. H. (Hap) Arnold, commanding general of the Army Air Corps, and General Ira C. Eaker, deputy Air Corps commander, had both written to commend Sam for the last article he had published while in the service. This Colliers story, "What a German General Thought," contrasted statements made by General Arnold with statements made by Nazi General Bayerlein during interrogation. The article positively impacted public perception of the role that air power played in the European victory, and the Pentagon had been abuzz for days after the magazine hit the streets. 32

When he had returned to New York on terminal leave, Sam was met by two agents of Walt Disney, who offered him ajob. In fact, two years earlier, a few weeks after he had been drafted, Sam had received a letter from Walt Disney with ajob offer. His brief reply at the time had been to express his regrets and inform the film maker, "I am presently fully employed by the government." Now settled again in Redwood City, he began working on the movie script for The AbsentMinded Professor, a fantasy based on two stories published in Liberty that had attracted the eye of Disney.33

In this story, the inventive Taylor came up with a substance called "flubber" that powered a gravity-defying automobile. Flubber, he suggested in the original story, was a substance vastly superior to rubber and would be useful in the war effort. He adapted the story and the substance into a screenplay for the Disney movie starring Fred MacMurray. His script was nominated for an Oscar for the best screenplay and won an award from the Screenwriters of America for the best comedy screenplay of 1961.

Thirty-six years later, the Disney Studios remade the film, calling it Flubber. On the Monday following Thanksgiving Day, 1997, ABC News reported that Flubber had been the most popular of all movies over the Thanksgiving weekend, grossing thirty-six million dollars A week later, Paul Harvey's News and Comment radio broadcast reported that it also outgrossed all other movies the following weekend. Several months prior to release of this film, Taylor had met with the star, Robin Williams, to talk with him about the script while the film company was shooting on location in San Francisco. Williams mentioned the joy his family had felt while watching The Absent-Minded Professor and assured Taylor that he was working to maintain the integrity of the story.34

Settling into work after more than three years of war, Sam was prepared for an era of productivity. Premature streaks of white accented his wavy dark hair, but he was in prime condition, prepared to tackle books, plays, articles, motion picture scripts, or any other writing project that came along. While overseas he had used odd moments to draw plans for his office and was looking forward to building it.

Unfortunately, wartime strictures were still in effect, and building materials were not available. He could not work in the living room or bedroom, for his daughter, Sara, was then two and a half years old, and the bond between them was so strong that she would hardly let him out of her sight. There also was another child living in the home: Elizabeth, the daughter of Gay's sister A year younger than Sara, she would remain with the Taylors for some five years.

So Sam used the furnace room, a four-by-eight-foot alcove in the north side of the house, still empty because of the shortages. His desk would just exactly fit in the space but could not be moved in because of the angles involved. Faced with this obstacle, he cobbled together an ingenious hinging device for the legs and made the desk fit.35

As he built his house and office and made landscaping improvements, he used power tools that he also made himself A combination power tool that he made from scratch, which served as a drill press, power saw, and sander, was used in the Walt Disney picture The Hound Who Thought He Was a Raccoon. It is still operable and in his workshop. Gay later said, "Sam could fix anything and make anything. He was a genius in more ways than one."36

In this postwar period, Sam wrote six days a week, compensating for this sedentary work with strenuous exercises, long walks, work on his office, and golf—which he faithfully played three afternoons a week, rain or shine He wrote the thriller The Man with My Face while sitting in that furnace room alcove, face to the wall. The story appeared first as a six-part serial in Liberty magazine. According to the magazine's editor, it was the best serial the magazine ever had published, and he defied his fellow staff members to tell how the protagonist would get out of his predicament Later, the story was published as a book in 1948 and then made into a motion picture. In 1989 the book was republished in England as part of the Black Dagger series of mystery books. The story was of an ordinary American who returned to his suburban home after work and found himself in an extraordinary situation, face to face with a man who looked, talked, and walked exactly as he did and who had arrived home on the earlier train. The mystery built from that point. But in making the picture, Hollywood changed the entire tone of the story, setting it in Puerto Rico. Thus handicapped, the movie was only of fair quality.37

About this time Sam completed a three-act stage play, entitled The Square Needle, that was produced in the spring of 1951 in Hollywood and San Francisco with a talented cast of veteran performers that included Victor Jory, Donald Woods, Alan Hale, Jr., and Marjorie

Lord The play was based upon the antics of soldiers who, despite the rigors of war, lived more luxuriously than their fellow servicemen. Socalled "operators," these soldiers avoided living in normal barracks by various devious means. Some of the elaborate schemes they worked to garner their special status came from actual situations Sam had known of during his time in the service The play was optioned for by Broadway, but the option was never exercised.38

A number of Taylor's stories have been made into motion pictures, and he also contributed original material to Hollywood He wrote scripts for Disney, Columbia, MGM, Warner Brothers, and independent producers. He also produced scripts for the popular Bonanza television series and the Alfred Hitchcock Presents mystery series.39

One of the novels which came out of the postwar period was called Heaven Knows Why, a lighthearted fantasy about Mormons and the afterlife. It first appeared as a serial in Colliers as "The Mysterious Way." When the book was published, however, it was greeted with stony silence by LDS people, who were affronted by seeming ridicule Gay said that Sam "got out of the doghouse" with his fellow church members when a Brigham Young University professor, Richard Cracroft, wrote an article in Sunstone in which he praised the humor of the book. Cracroft has used this book and other Taylor works in his university classes.40

In addition to fiction, Taylor was commissioned to write a number of nonfiction pieces. One was the company history of a business that invented and manufactured a gas chromatograph. Sam said this piece provided material for an article that sold to both the Saturday Evening Post and Reader's Digest—but neither published it. His comment was, "What a crazy business this is!"41

In mid-century, a cloud no bigger than a writer's plans was to signal the demise of an era. That cloud was television, and it soon lured Americans from the printed page to the tube. Both the pulps and the slicks were on their backs, feebly waving their paws in the air. So Sam adjusted to the trend Although he spent some time in Hollywood, getting work there was an iffy proposition. Besides, he lived in Redwood City, and batching it in an apartment near the studios with a couple of other writer friends was not the way Sam wanted to live his life. He tolerated such arrangements for short periods but soon turned to nonfiction, particularly that based on Mormon history.

While Sam Taylor wrote primarily for the outside world about his people, and while some Mormons resent objective literature about their culture, he has been tossed bouquets among the brickbats. In reprinting one of his articles in the book Among the Mormons, editors William Mulder and A. Russell Mortensen said, "No talented native son knows Utah better than Samuel W. Taylor, or writes about it so gaily and so aptly." Kenneth B. Hunsaker of Utah State University, in a survey of Mormon literature, listed Family Kingdom as "best Mormon biography" and Heaven Knows Why as "best Mormon novel."42

Sam wrote a number of serious biographies, including Family Kingdom, The Kingdom or Nothing, and a two-volume collection, TheJohn Taylor Papers. These were busy times, and it is small wonder that in addressing a writers group in San Francisco, Sam said: "Writing is not a profession, it is not a craft, it is a disease. But if you've got to have an ailment, I can't think of a better one." He gave talks before various groups of writers in California and repeatedly made this point: "The novice or amateur writer seems to think his words are etched in stone, and that the first draft must not be changed The professional writes and rewrites, revises and polishes." Sam used unusual gestures as he spoke, whether with one person or before a crowd. He would swing his arms dramatically, especially when illustrating a writing problem and solution, and move his hands in a fascinating pattern to lend emphasis to his concepts.43

Among the books Sam wrote were a mystery entitled The Grinning Gizmo; a story about contemporary plural marriage, I Have Six Wives; and one concerning the uranium boom called Uranium Fever, or No Talk under a Million. He wrote this last-named book in collaboration with his older brother, Raymond, who expected to make his fortune by mining uranium. In company with Tom McGowan, the two made a motion picture about the pursuit of riches in uranium.

The decades after the war were productive for Sam although he frequently was forced to alter his writing time because of the flow of visitors. There were would-be writers, old friends, and established writers or editors—or a combination of the three. And there were frequent visits from men and women practicing polygamy. The Taylors were friendly and courteous, and one day they served dinner to a group of adults who filled the modest-sized dining room and two dozen children outside on the lawn.

Sam never used "writer's block" as an excuse to rest but pounded away, and if the piece did not turn out to his satisfaction, he rewrote until it was right. One day a young man who wanted to be a writer came to his door and asked permission to sit in a corner of the office while Sam worked. Sam endured about five minutes of this then courteously showed the man to the door. He later said, "I'd rather have had a boa constrictor in the corner."44 Until his fatal illness, Sam maintained a daily schedule, and in the 1990s he produced some autobiographical material such as the paperback book Taylor-Made Tales and a collection of some of his wartime series, Take My Advice, Mr. President. Sam's attitude toward the LDS church also changed after publication and acceptance in LDS circles of Family Kingdom and Nightfall in Nauvoo, which recounted the events leading to the historic Mormon pioneer movement to the West He became an active member of the Redwood City Ward, was ordained an elder, and worked to convince lapsed Mormons to rejoin and become active He became Elders Quorum president and later served as ward membership clerk At the same time, he continued to analyze the church and its doctrines and appeared at a number of sessions of Sunstone and Dialogue gatherings in Salt Lake City.45

In all, he published more than seventeen books. When asked for a list several years ago, he said, "The number is indefinite because some appeared under pen names, and I'll say no more about them." In regular correspondence over the years, Sam almost always ended his notes with the Biblical term Selah, frequently found at the end of some of the Psalms. To anyone who has corresponded with Sam, this will strike a familiar note.46

He produced special projects such as the script for an industrial film for U.S. Steel; material for a book on the nation's highways, Freedom of the American Road, issued by Ford Motor Company; a section of a California school text; a book on the trucking industry called Line Haul; and Vineyard by the Bay, a history of Mormonism in the San Francisco Bay Area He also created a TV series for NBC and did the pilot scripts.47 For the BYU Motion Picture Department Taylor wrote a screenplay based on the life ofJacob Hamblin; it was intended as the first full-length feature by BYU and was designed for distribution through commercial theaters. He also was commissioned to write a screenplay based on the legend of Porter Rockwell, which he completed in the late '80s Neither of these screenplays has been produced.

In a recent tribute to Taylor, Levi S. Peterson, noted Mormon author, said, "Taylor's personality, as it appears in his writings, is experienced, skeptical, a little cynical, always funny, and always cogent His style reads easily and finds its felicitous metaphors among the speech of ordinary people."48

At the graveside service for Samuel W Taylor, his daughter, Sara Weston, explained the presence of prunings from Sam's favorite trees on their property; he had lovingly protected each sprig of a new tree on his acreage if he found it first. She admitted that others in the family had been trained to pull up any such volunteer sprigs, yet forty of those he staked and declared untouchable remain, still subjects of his protection. As Taylor's remains were prepared for burial, Sara made sure he had a notebook and ballpoint pen tucked into his shirt pocket because, she said, "He had never been without them in life." In the last weeks of his life, Sara told the graveside audience, Sam had expressed his concern about facing a premature death, because he had "one more story to tell." She concluded by saying, "Perhaps we will have a chance to hear that story in a later existence."49

Selah.

NOTES

A retired newspaperman living in St George, Jean R Paulson completed this article just before his death in August 1998. He acknowledged the invaluable assistance of Doug Paulson, Gay Dimick Taylor, and Sara Taylor Weston in the preparation of this work

1 Samuel W Taylor, Taylor-Made Tales (Murray, UT: Aspen Books, 1994, hereafter cited as Tales), 164 Before publication of Tales the author had obtained this story and others in the book through interviews and correspondence with Taylor. Hereafter, these letters are cited as "SWT to JRP."

Taylor had to use various creative methods to get his manuscripts into the normal mail system while he was in the U S Army because all correspondence from soldiers was subjected to army censorship Had he mailed the manuscripts on the post, he said, his stories might have been delivered to the publisher with numerous words or even paragraphs neatly cut out with a razor blade

2 SWT toJRP, February 2, 1992, and Taylor, Tales, 136

3 Under increasing pressure, and realizing that in order for Utah to obtain statehood the LDS church would have to renounce polygamy, in 1890 Wilford Woodruff issued a "Manifesto" stating that the church would no longer practice plural marriage

4 Samuel W Taylor, The Kingdom orNothing (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 190-374 In researching this book, Sam and his brother Raymond discovered that their grandfather had seventeen wives and perhaps more, not the seven "officially" attributed to him John Taylor remained underground for more than two years, moving from place to place to elude persistent federal marshals and deputies and, his health shattered, died while hiding at the Roueche farm home in Kaysville, Utah Deputies had once come to that home in search of him, but he hid in a pile of wheat in the granary This was one of numerous narrow escapes John Taylor took his final wife,Josephine Elizabeth Roueche, at this last hiding place She was twenty-six; he was seventy-seven

5 Taylor, Tales, 13, 61; J R Paulson, Interview Notes, April, 1994, hereafter cited as Notes;]. R Paulson, "Mormon Author Never Lacks Ideas for a Story," [Provo] Daily Herald, November 24, 1994, hereafter cited as "Mormon Author."

6 Paulson, Notes. In later years, Taylor was giving a talk before members of the Redwood City LDS Ward and waved a piece of paper. "This is a prescription which says I should drink a certain number of cups of coffee every day Wouldn't you like to know the name of my doctor?"

There is an ironic twist to Sam's taste for coffee In 1994, he and daughter Sara were guests at the author's home in St George, Utah At breakfast, he waved away an offer of coffee, saying, 'Would you like to hear a faith-promoting story? I am now allergic to coffee Can't stand it!"

7 SWT toJRP, December 9, 1987; Taylor, Tales, 108.

8 SWT toJRP, December 8, 1987

9 SWT toJRP, December 13, 1987; Taylor, Tales, 125.

10 At one meeting of the Pi-P's, the group was discussing H L Mencken, whose biting essays were published in the American Mercury magazine To one of Taylor's remarks, Paulson said, "Sam, you're mencken me sick!" He responded, "That sounds like H L." From then on, all members of the group would say "H. L.," whenever their conversation demanded an expletive; BYU students then, as now, could be censured for cursing aloud on campus

11 SWT to JRP, April 3, 1988; Paulson, Notes. Taylor exaggerated the length of his courtship; Sam and Gay met in 1930 and were married August 6, 1934 They had become engaged in Salt Lake City's Liberty Park, near the spot where Sam's father and mother had been married while on a carriage ride in the park

12 Gay Taylor, "Why Am I Here?" in Dialogue, Summer 1991, 94

13 Paulson, Notes.

14 SWT toJRP, February 1976, and Taylor, Tales, 164

15 Paulson, Notes.

16 SWT toJPR, November 24, 1987

17 SWT toJRP, February 1976

18 Gay Taylor to JRP, December 6, 1997 (hereafter cited as GT to JRP); SWT to GT,July 22, 1943, and Taylor, Tales, 135

19 Paulson, Notes; GT toJRP, postmarked December 11, 1997; and Taylor, Tales, 132 At this point in his military career, Taylor said he was enjoying military life and was looking forward to the possibility of a career as an army officer, hopefully in the intelligence service But the cancellation of training and the substitution of marching drills led him to the decision to continue focusing on a writing career.

20 GT toJRP, November 27, 1997; Paulson, Notes.

21 SWT toJRP, November 4, 1987

22 Paulson, Notes.

23 Ibid

24 Taylor, Tales, 138. The choice of the Ritz as the headquarters for the PR group may have been influenced by the fact that Hemingway had made the hotel and its famous bar his "watering hole" for a number of years prior to the war This is documented in several of the biographical works on Hemingway The biographies do not include this marvelous story of C-rations on silver platters, however, perhaps because Hemingway was being given a royal welcome by his old friends in the bar; he did not take meals with the rest of the PR group.

25 Ibid., 135

26 SWT toJRP,July 5, 1988; Paulson, "Mormon Author."

27 SWT toJRP, November 18, 1987; Taylor, Tales, 151.

28 In a letter to JRP dated November 4, 1997, Gay Taylor said that during the time of the Battle of the Bulge "I didn't have a word from him for a month I lost 20 pounds and a good deal of sleep."

29 Paulson, Notes.

30 SWT toJRP,July 24, 1987; Taylor, Tales, 145

31 Paulson, Notes.

32 Gen H H Arnold to SWT, October 18, 1945; Gen I C Eaker to SWT, October 18, 1945, in possession of Gay Taylor.

33 SWT toJRP, November 7, 1984, with enclosure of speech given by SWT in September 1979.

34 Sara Weston, tape recording of graveside memorial service for SWT, Provo City Cemetery, October 3, 1997, hereafter cited as Memorial Service The producers of Flubberwere planning to replace the basketball game scene with something they thought would be more up-to-date, but, according to Weston, Williams convinced them to keep it as an essential element of the story

35 SWT toJRP, November 24, 1987

36 SWT toJRP, November 18, 1987, and July 5, 1988; GT toJRP, December 19, 1997

37 SWT to JRP, November 7, 1984, with enclosure of speech given by SWT in September 1979; Samuel W Taylor, The Man with My Face (London: Chivers Press Black Dagger Crime Series, 1989)

38 John Chapman, ed., The Best Plays of 1950-1951 (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1951), 35, 41 In the late '40s Taylor and Paulson collaborated on another three-act play, a mystery comedy; they worked together every Monday—Paulson's day off—in Taylor's office This was the first time in many years that the two had lived close enough to see each other regularly The setting for the play was a radio studio One change Paulson and Taylor made from the usual mystery was that they had the corpse fall into, rather than out of, the closet The play, like many other projects writers spend considerable time on, was never published or performed.

While they were writing it, a friend was living temporarily at the Taylor place. One noon, when the writers went into the house for lunch, they were greeted by the young man "Have you finished it?" he asked "Not yet." "I see All work, and no play." It was impossible to avoid a battle of puns when you were around Sam Taylor

39 Memorial Service

40 SWT toJRP, December 9, 1994; Richard H Cracroft, "Freshet in the Dearth: Samuel W Taylor's Heaven Knows Why and Mormon Humor," Sunstone, Summer 1980, 31.

41 SWT toJRP, February 1976

42 SWT to JRP, November 4, 1984; Taylor, Tales, 173; SWT to JRP, November 7, 1984, with enclosure of speech given by SWT in September 1979; Taylor, Tales, 174

43 SWT toJRP, November 7, 1984, with enclosure of speech; Paulson, Notes.

44 Paulson, Notes.

45 Though Taylor made jokes about having been a "lapsed Mormon" through part of his life, he not only received priesthood ordination but also prepared for and participated in LDS temple ceremonies Taylor and his wife and daughter went through temple sealing procedures prior to Sara's marriage Apparently, these facts never came up in the conversations between Taylor and the author; at least Jean Paulson never mentioned it to Doug Paulson, his son and personal assistant Doug Paulson confirmed the fact of the temple sealings with Sara Weston after the author's death As a teenager visiting the Taylor home, Doug had often heard Gay telling Sam she did not want to be just a "ministering angel" in the hereafter

46 SWT to JRP, February 1976 Webster's New WorldDictionary, Second College Edition (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), defines "selah" as "a Hebrew word of unknown meaning at the end of verses in the Psalms; perhaps as a musical direction, but traditionally interpreted as a blessing meaning 'forever.'"

47 According to Sara Weston and papers in her possession, two of the series ideas that Sam pitched to NBC were Peculiar People and Bad Boy. Peculiar People was to be a "series based upon people who are 'peculiar' in two ways First, they have done things of exceptional interest The subject of the first segment is a little old lady who deliberately set out to become a millionaire in order to finance her work with delinquent boys Another segment is the story of a Samoan longshoreman who makes a precarious living on the San Francisco docks while raising millions of dollars for charitable purposes A third is the story of the man who guided the Mormon Tabernacle Choir through the years during which it became a national institution

"The second way in which our people are peculiar is that they all have an abiding faith in Deity and try to live their lives accordingly This, frankly, is the underlying motive of the series, to present interesting people of achievement who try to live according to the rules of their faith."

Bad Boy was set in the nostalgic period of the turn of the century Some story ideas: to thwart the baptism of the no-good man who wants to marry his mother, the Bad Boy tricks the entire household into believing that Sunday is Saturday; and, when traveling with his prospective stepfather, the Bad Boy convinces authorities that he has been kidnapped and brought to the big city to be trained as a pickpocket.

48 Levi S Peterson, "In Memoriam: Samuel W Taylor," Sunstone, 21:3 (August 1988), 11 Peterson had interviewed Taylor before the 1994 Sunstone Symposium in Salt Lake City This brief article is an insightful tribute to SWT.

49 Memorial Service