Who's Here

Tom Clavin - Writer

By Renée Donlon

Tom Clavin has spent the last few years at sea. In 2005, he sailed deep into the waters off Montauk in a small fishing boat. Then he sailed to the South Pacific, traveling there in a fleet Navy ships. On both oceans, he encountered violent storms. On both oceans, he heard tragic tales of drowned men and awesome tales of rescued ones. While being on both oceans, Clavin sat in his desk chair in a room in Sag Harbor, rising occasionally to roam the halls of the National Archives or Veterans Halls in Virginia.

Clavin can do this — can transcend time and space — because he is a writer. The author of scores of magazine and newspapers articles and of eight books writes, “history, romance, adventure — all the things a writer sitting in his room alone doesn’t get to do.”

Now finally, with the publication of his latest book, Halsey’s Typhoon, with co-author Bob Drury, Clavin is doing some physical traveling. This time, he is sailing from airport to airport on a twenty-day book tour for the recent New York Times best seller.

The book tells the story of World War IIs mighty Third Fleet and how the Navy’s most esteemed admiral at the time, Admiral Halsey, drove its one hundred and seventy ships through a raging typhoon. Three ships sank and only eighty of the nearly eight hundred men on board those ships survived. Clavin and Drury tell of the seven story waves that battered the ships, the days some men spent floating in the Pacific, the sharks and delirium from the sun that accompanied them.

The only thing more unbelievable than this story is that fact that no one has heard it until now. This is because the whole event was immediately classified, declared top secret, to save the reputation of Admiral Halsey, a hero after Pearl Harbor. Besides, what would the Japanese think of us if they knew we had sailed our fleet right into a typhoon?

“I said to myself, how come I’ve never heard this story?” said Clavin in a phone interview. Clavin had been raised in a Naval family. His dad and two uncles had served. He had grown up on sea stories of WWII, and yet he had never heard of the Typhoon Cobra incident until years later while doing research for his previous book, Dark Noon. Clavin got interested.

Classified records. The death of seven hundred men. Lost ships and reputations. Telling a story like this sounds daunting. But Clavin has experience on his side. He has been writing for years, about almost everything, for almost everybody.

His beginnings were humble. He wrote stories just for himself when he was a child. (He had been reminiscing about this just moments before our phone interview with his aunt, his “second mother,” at whose house he had stopped during the California leg of the book tour.) Eight-year-old Clavin packed up his stories and moved with his parents from the Bronx to Long Island. He attended Suffolk Community College before leaving the island for the University of Southern California. Then it was back to New York, living upstate for a while, before his first professional job took him to NYC. That job was with The Guinness Book of World Records. There, he was a proofreader, copy editor, and the first line of defense against people who “showed up at the office with their potty-trained iguanas.” You may wonder how one gets a job like that. Clavin got it because he “was willing to accept a low salary.”

Clavin prides himself on taking every opportunity he could find to earn a living writing. “If someone offered me fifteen bucks [to write something], I’d write it.” This drive and a “dislike of authority,” led Clavin out of NYC and the employee-style job to the Hamptons and the world of freelancing. February 1st will mark the 25th anniversary of he and his wife’s move to the East End. “We moved here because it was cheaper…… We paid $400 a month for our house on Noyack,” Clavin laughs.

Clavin paid the nostalgically low rent by writing for several newspapers and magazines, including The Southampton Press, The New York Times, Parade Magazine, Parenting Magazine, Golf Magazine, Men’s Journal, etc. The topics of his articles were as diverse as the publications. Some of his favorites include two pieces for Parade Magazine. The first was on competitive eating; the second, Extreme Ironing. I’m not even sure if that needs to be capitalized, but for something so bizarre, it feels almost necessary. Seventy million people read Calvin’s exposéé on the illogical sport in which people do extreme activities and finish with a little ironing. Climb a cliff; iron a shirt at the top. I cannot believe these people walk among us, but Clavin found them and spoke with them about their campaign to make Extreme Ironing an Olympic sport. (But, really if they can have curling, why not ironing?)

Though Clavin enjoys entertaining with his articles, he has a deep passion for the more serious pieces, such as the one he did on the 100,000 hospital deaths that occur each year. “I like the investigative pieces because those have a chance to make a difference, to maybe change a law.”

Between investigating hospital fatalities and interviewing hyperactive ironers, Clavin found time to be managing editor of the East Hampton Star and, in 1993, editor of the Independent. He published his first book the same year. He turned to book writing full time in 2003 and has published three books since then. A biography of golfer Walter Hagen was published in February of 2005, followed seven months later by Dark Noon, a story about the fate of Montauk’s Pelican, a fishing boat that lost forty-five of its sixty-two passengers in a surprise gale on Labor Day weekend, 1951.

Clavin continued the maritime theme into his eighth book, Halsey’s Typhoon. The tragic story has elicited an emotional response. Clavin began the book tour at the Gerald Ford Museum in Grand Rapids Michigan (Ford was an officer in the Third Fleet). In the crowd was a survivor of the typhoon. When he spoke during the Q&A, the best Clavin could do was to “get out of the way” and let him tell his story. Another time, it took Clavin ninety minutes to sign 30 or 40 books- the rest of the time was filled with the stories of the veterans present.

Clavin has a gift for finding the stories in people. While researching Halsey’s Typhoon, he met Archie. Archie had floated for days in the ocean after the typhoon. When a shark bumped the back of his leg, Archie pulled an onion from his pocket (he had grabbed it as it floated by the day before) and shoved it in the shark’s mouth. The shark swam away, and Archie celebrated his eight-eighth birthday this past December.

These are the stories Clavin finds. The hundred magazine and newspaper assignments to his name have served him well. “Nothing beats the byline,” Clavin proclaims. But it’s more than that. It’s the “sweat equity” that Clavin says it take to get a book published. It’s also triumph over rejection; “Like a boxer, someone will always catch you with a hook. It’s up to you if you’re going to get off the canvas.” Clavin is up and swinging.