For close to 40 years, author Mike Tougias has kept a cabin in Woodbury. The warm, wooden cabin stands in stark contrast to the adventurous world Tougias takes his readers.
Tougias books focus on real-life experiences on the high sea: winter ocean storms, 30-foot waves, German U-boats, merchant tankers, daring rescues and a heavy dose of girl power.
Tougias spoke with VPR about his 25th book, So Close To Home, and about his book, The Finest Hour, which has been turned into a live-action Disney film, currently in theaters.
Many of your books involve daring sea rescues. Are you a sailor?
"I'm a boater. I'm always out on the ocean fishing for striped bass. You'd never get me to do a trans-Atlantic voyage on a sailboat, though!"
What is the historic event that your 25th book, So Close To Home, is based on?
"So Close To Home takes place in 1942 when World War II breaks out and an American family is on a merchant ship returning to New Orleans, when just 30 miles off the mouth of the Mississippi River, up comes a U-boat and blasts two torpedoes into the ship. The little boy is 8 years old, the sister is 11, the young parents – they all get thrown into the ocean in different directions.
"A good portion of So Close To Home follows each one of their survival stories because they are separated. And I really thought that would be the heart of the book but during the research we discovered who the U-boat commander was who sank this ship and lo and behold at the National Archives, they had his war diary and all of a sudden, you see the same events from a very different perspective. It made me think very different about our German adversaries. They were not Nazi's. They were just young men – 18, 20 years old – trying to serve their country and what they went through on these U-boats."
Were you able to talk with survivors for first-hand accounts from the event?
"The 8-year-old boy actually lived not too far from me and so, we had not only his recollections of the event but we had all sorts of letters from the survivors and audio recordings they had done. And it borders on the miraculous, because I always look for a story of survival that involved females as well as males and this was the story. My other books, all the rescuers are male and all the survivors in the ocean that they were trying to save were males. So I said, 'I need to highlight the courageous actions and decision-making of females.' And I thought I'd get one or two. I never dreamed I'd get a whole family and the family dynamics of what they were trying to survive in the Gulf of Mexico."
Do you ever run into challenges getting information for your books?
"In my more recent survival-at sea books, sometimes it's just too raw and you may come across a survivor who just doesn't want to talk about it and I totally respect that. And I do share the part [of the book] that is about them with them, for accuracy and I've also found that does give them a level of comfort. They relax and they open up, knowing that, 'He's gonna get it right and I'm gonna have a chance to make sure he gets it right.'"
What was the historic event profiled in your book The Finest Hours and how did it get made into a Disney movie, starring actors Chris Pine and Casey Affleck?
"The Coast Guard's greatest and most daring rescue happened during a winter storm in 1952 when two giant oil tankers were split right in half from the waves off Cape Cod. It's a miracle rescue. A local producer in Boston read The Finest Hours and she asked the co-author and I if she could pitch it to Disney with two screenwriters that she'd worked with in the past. We were really lucky."
Have you seen the movie? And how was it to see it on the big screen?
"The first time I saw it, I couldn't help but compare but the second and third time, I absolutely loved it because I just let myself go like I was Joe Public. I got to hang out with Chris Pine and Casey Affleck and Holiday Grainger and they would ask me about the characters they were portraying in The Finest Hours. The rescue [scene] was spot-on. You know, it was exactly how the survivors described it. And, you know, if you didn't know that, you'd think that Disney's making this stuff up."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQmllwTKtqU
Woodbury author Mike Tougias has written 25 books and the one he says still garners the most response from readers is There's A Porcupine In My Outhouse. The book focuses on his misadventures after graduation from St. Michael's College and moving to a cabin in Woodbury to be a wildlife photographer.
You can find photos and an interview with So Close To Home survivor Sonny Downs here.
Tougias will speak about his books on July 19 at the Jeffersonville library, at the Waterford Library on August 4 and at the Springfield Library on August 31. All events will include a historic photos in a slide presentation of The Finest Hours.
