Walt Morey used to advise beginning writers, “Write what you know and remember everything that you see and hear. It can be someone you have met, a place you have seen, or even a newspaper article that piqued your interest.” With an unwavering dedication to telling unique stories for the time, Walt used elements of characterization drawn from friends, family, and acquaintances to form the basis of his work. He sought out life experiences that would lend newness to his work, from short stories in adventure magazines to novels read by millions, young and old alike.
Many lives can be categorized in phases, from childhood to young adulthood to later maturity, each with its own set of personal milestones and influences. Walt’s own life is no different. He was born in 1907, in an era between the last of the old West and the beginning of the new age of industrialization. The Pacific Northwest was home, first in the Gray’s Harbor area of Washington, to the Willamette Valley in Oregon, to the breaks of the Missouri River in Montana. As a young man, Walt was familiar with the forests and streams in the wilderness and the wildlife that populated them. Life required the responsible use of what nature provided through hunting, fishing, or gathering. Waste or destruction of resources was not tolerated.
Walt spoke of his educational background as one who, “backed out the schoolhouse door. They gave me a diploma either out of sympathy or that they had an extra one lying around.” Not a great student by his own admission, he found a great passion for reading. While living in Great Falls, Montana, Walt was given a book entitled Chip of the Flying U, a story in a series of novels by B. M. Bower, the first successful female western-story writer. The book was illustrated by (and reportedly based in part on the early life of) western artist and sculptor Charles Russell, who lived near the Morey family. Walt would reminisce that as a youngster he hated to read but when he started this book it was like a veil was lifted, “I found myself flying across the plains with Chip on back of a fast horse.” He said it was like opening the floodgates to his imagination. Tales of adventure and daring deeds fed his new-found desire to read that stayed with him throughout his life.
Always a great story-teller with a booming laugh, Walt found his urge to become a writer at 20 years of age through reading. He had just finished reading Zane Grey’s The Vanishing American and felt disappointed by a story that ended not to his liking. “I sat down that evening and thought that if a man had planned and written a story for my entertainment, then another man could change that ending to one he liked.” After writing about four-hundred words into a new ending that he thought worked to his satisfaction, Walt had an epiphany — he was going to become a writer.
He bought an old open-keyed Underwood typewriter and a touch-system guidebook. “Over the next two years I wrote what had to be the longest sentence in the history of writing,” he said. “At least 125,000 words before I added my first period. Why? Because I didn’t know punctuation and the rules of grammar, I didn’t know how to write a lick,” he said. Walt would take a book or story and break it down word for word. Why was this word capitalized; why was this punctuation mark placed in this spot? He learned the mechanics of writing through sheer determination. By his estimate, Walt wrote and re-wrote thousands of words over the next several years trying to complete his first book, but it was never submitted for publication. He never thought it was good enough.
Support came from his childhood friend, Rosalind Ogden, whom he had known from second grade in Hoquiam, Washington and re-met in high school in Portland. While Walt worked after graduation from high school, Rosalind attended college to become a schoolteacher. His work ethic formed from early age helped him span the hard times of the Great Depression as he found work in the woods and sawmills, building construction, and shipyards to name just a few. As many young men did in these times, Walt found success in the boxing ring where he fought as an amateur for three years and won over 30 fights.
His 1934 marriage to Rosalind, who was then a schoolteacher in Portland, found him working as a theater manager. John Hawkins, a successful writer and friend in Portland suggested he develop short stories, based on Walt’s own life experiences and background. He figured Walt a natural storyteller who could capture those ideas in the written word. Stories for the pulp fiction market for magazines such as Argosy, Sports Action, Texas Rangers, and Boys Life paid a penny a word.
In 1937, Walt sold his first published work, a boxing story called The Hell Man to Knockout Magazine. For the next fifteen years, Walt wrote stories depicting the old west, deep sea diving, logging, as well as the boxing ring for the pulp trades. His first novel-length story, No Cheers, No Glory, was a 60,000-word piece published in its entirety in Blue Book Magazine in 1945.
One of the most significant influences on his creative life came from a chance meeting with an owner of a home Walt was looking to purchase for Rosalind’s parents. Virgil Burford was a long-time Alaska adventurer and deep sea diver who quickly became a friend and confidant. Virgil convinced Walt to venture up to Alaska’s Prince William Sound area where the two men donned copper helmet diving suits to inspect salmon traps on the ocean floor. His trips around the Sound to isolated fishing communities, hunting & fishing camps, and observation of the natural environment full of bear, moose, sea life, and of course sled dogs, fed Walt’s imagination to the brim. This was a country he loved and the wild characters he met fueled his story telling for the rest of his life.
The advent of broadcast television in the 1950’s brought a huge decline in the demand for pulp magazines and for adventure short story writers like Walt. He had been in negotiations with Hollywood agents and producers for a movie treatment Walt had written when it seemed the market for his work simply dropped off the table. While he was able to turn the proposal into a memoir by Virgil Burford (as told to Walt) titled North to Danger, this phase of his writing career seemed to come to a close. When a hard freeze killed the filbert orchard he and Rosalind had farmed since just before World War II, Walt purchased a similar farm in Oregon and didn’t write again for the next ten years.
However, the desire to write never left him. Rosalind took several of his old short stories to her middle-school classes to share with the young students. She pressed Walt to take up writing again, this time with work geared toward young readers who had limited reading options. Walt was adamant that he wouldn’t target his work for a specific age group — he wouldn’t write down to people for “kid stories.” Rosalind replied that Call of the Wild and White Fang by Jack London were not kid stories but kids loved them. Stubbornly, after several years of prodding by his wife, Walt decided to prove that he could not write something just for young people that would also meet his criteria of being a good yarn anyone would enjoy.
He remembered his adventurous years prior with his friend Virgil and seeing in Alaska what at the time was the largest known Kodiak bear. Walt developed a story with elements of duty, friendship, loyalty, and respect for wildlife and their natural environment. His characters had combinations of traits Walt had observed over many in friends, family and those he met on his adventures. After six months of writing and revising, he showed his draft of the first few chapters of his new story to friend and fellow writer/teacher Don James. Both men thought it was well-crafted but didn’t know if the literary world would accept it. They did.
Within the next thirty days in the fall of 1965, Walt balanced the crucial harvesting period for his orchard, care of his invalid mother and her passing that month, to complete the award-winning novel, Gentle Ben. Over the next fifteen years, twelve more novels and one non-fiction work (Operation Blue Bear) were published, all with overriding themes mirroring Walt’s life experiences and man’s interaction with wildlife and nature. In the next several years, Home is the North, Kävik the Wolf Dog, and Scrub Dog of Alaska reflect Walt’s love of Alaska and loyalty between a boy and his dog. Walt continued to back up him admonition to, “write what you know,” with Angry Waters, a story based on a great flood of the Columbia River in Oregon that he witnessed. Year of the Black Pony and Runaway Stallion were stories based on events from his childhood in Jasper, Oregon.
Walt also believed in the ability (and in some cases the responsibility) of writers to bring to the open issues they see as needing recognition and change. Canyon Winter and Run Far, Run Fast, illustrate the dangers of clear-cutting logging practices in public forestland.
After 44 years of marriage, his wife Rosalind developed cancer and required months of in and outpatient therapy. Walt had cared for her at home for over a year when she passed away in 1977 and with her death Walt’s passion for writing ebbed. During Rosalind’s hospital therapy sessions, Walt met Peggy Kilburn, who had also been receiving rehabilitative treatments as a result of a severe automobile accident that had killed her husband, Clarence. Perhaps connected by circumstance from the loss of their respective spouses and mutual encouragement during troubling times for both, their good friendship developed.
That friendship grew in the next 16 months following Rosalind’s passing and Walt and Peggy were married in June 1978. Walt rebounded with two books, Sandy and the Rock Star (1978) with themes regarding private big-game ranches where exotic animals are stocked and hunted for sport and Lemon Meringue Dog (1980) based on a story Walt learned about from a news article about the use of German shepherd dogs in drug interdiction programs.
Now past the age of 70, Walt seemed content live a quiet life on the Wilsonville, Oregon filbert orchard. The quiet life however, didn’t fit Walt. Always thinking of new story plots, different ways to tell a story, Walt chose to help aspiring authors to learn the craft of writing and how to inspire his latest audience, young readers, in sharing his love of reading. Walt became a fixture in writer’s conferences and seminars, always ready to talk to others on how they, too, could master the mechanics of writing stories and novels because he learned the profession from others, albeit coupled with his steadfast determination to master the subject that not many people can match.
Walt loved to talk with kids, and for the next decade he and Peggy’s daughter Lucy traveled to hundreds of elementary and middle schools in the Pacific Northwest. Where Walt once said he would never “write down” to try and make young people like his books, neither would he talk down to them. A presentation given to a group of aspiring adult writers would be the same given the 7th Grade class. He felt if you could not picture the setting in your mind while you read his words, if you could not immediately picture his characters, such Fogg Benson, Stampede Annie, or Omar Pickett if they walked into the classroom, then he hadn’t done his job as a writer.
Walt’s last work came at the end of his long life. Death Walk was published in 1991, and is a story he kicked around for several years about fugitives from justice leaving the “lower 48” to essentially hide in the remote Alaskan wilderness.
Walt’s work garnered wide support and adulation. He earned many awards, including:
Dutton Animal Book Award — 1965 (Gentle Ben) and 1968 (Kävik the Wolf Dog)
Sequoyah Book Award — 1968 (Gentle Ben)
Dorothy Canfield Fisher Children’s Book Award — 1970 (Kävik the Wolf Dog)
Monique Alexis Hoswoot Award
William Allen White Children’s Book Award — 1971 (Kävik the Wolf Dog)
Willamette Writers Distinguished Northwest Writer Award — 1988
Charles Erskine Scott Wood Distinguished Writers Award — 1991
Oregon Educational Media Association OEMA Lifetime Achievement Award — 1991
Since 1998, the Oregon Book Awards has awarded the Walt Morey Young Readers Literary Legacy Award to “a person or organization in recognition of significant contributions that have enriched Oregon’s young readers.”
In January 1992 on a Sunday morning, standing in front of the television waiting for the panel discussion shows to start, Walt died from a massive heart attack at the age of 85. Even now, twenty years later, his stories remain dynamic adventures for all readers and are part of the shared history of the Pacific Northwest.
