Ogamo Publishing Company: Creating The Boy and the Shark

How The Boy and the Shark became a book

The writing

When Mekiah was very young, perhaps five or six years old, he and I watched a program about shark attacks on the Discovery Channel. He was very fascinated by sharks at the time. The program portrayed a reenactment of the shark attacks in Matawan, New Jersey, in 1916. I was very moved by the story. A short time later I sat down to write, and the story of the boy and the shark was born. I wanted to honor the boy who had lost his life when he was still so young. I read the story to Mekiah that Christmas and gave it to him as a gift. The story stayed in a notebook for many years, until I read it to a group of friends who enthusiastically responded to it and suggested I do something more.

The illustration

In the beginning, I asked Mekiah to sketch some pictures for the story. Neither of us had any idea how to get from the idea of illustrating a book to an actual picture that illustrated the story. Somewhat reluctantly and hesitantly, he drew this first sketch for the beginning of the story:

I thought it was a good start, but we weren’t sure what to do next. We asked one of Mekiah’s art teachers if she would help with the project. She referred us to another young artist, Anne Phillips, who agreed to help.

Anne and Mekiah began by dividing the story into scene segments. Then Mekiah created a few rough sketches for each scene. For example, in the scene where the little shark goes up the creek, he drew six small sketches of the creek and the shark from slightly different perspectives. You can see the shift in detail from trees to cattails as he developed the picture:

In his next drawing, Mekiah created a larger setting for the scene, with more detail. You can see more cattails, and trees receding in the distance. The house and the bridge now make it clear that the shark is entering the human world:

Mekiah used a lightbox to trace the original pencil drawings onto thicker paper with ink. Now, we were ready to scan the images into the computer and combine them with the text. This is where Julie’s help in designing the book was invaluable. What font should we use? Is it better to separate the words and pictures or combine them in some way? Should we place an image with the page numbers? Where should the text be placed on each page? Sometimes we needed to tweak the images to fit better on a page, especially when we had to switch from a 10.5 x 8 format to a 10 x 8 format. Her eye for detail helped so much in creating the whole.

One example of this is a small detail that emerged from Julie working with the above image. The small clump of cattails on the far bank at the left of the image became a motif for the page numbers on the bottom of alternating text pages which you can see below. Later, that motif became the logo for Ogamo Publishing Company.

We were also faced with the challenge of wanting to make the text page more interesting than just a blank white page with text. We decided to use a part of the image from the preceding page, altering it somewhat by reversing it or increasing or decreasing its size and, most importantly, changing its opacity so that the image could show through from “behind” the text. Then, we had to decide where to place the text. Sometimes, the image presented itself clearly, as did the bridge here, but with others we had more difficulty choosing. Sometimes all of this would take a half hour, but sometimes we spent an hour or two on a single page.

After lengthy trial and error, we finally settled upon a degree of opacity that we were comfortable with, but when Bang Printing sent us the proofs, the images were much darker than they were when we printed them. We had to send proofs and revisions back and forth several times to get the opacity we wanted:

The true story that inspired this book

It was the first week of July, 1916. A shark attacked and killed a young man swimming only fifty feet from shore at Beach Haven, New Jersey. A few days later a shark attacked a young hotel bellboy at Spring Lake, about forty-five miles north of Beach Haven. He was swimming beyond the safety ropes when the shark attacked him, bit through his legs, and severed them from his body. He died on the beach. Whether the same shark attacked both men is not known.

On July 12, just a few days after those shark attacks, something unusual happened in Matawan, New Jersey, twenty miles north of Spring Lake. Matawan is linked to the Atlantic Ocean by a tidal creek that is only 11 yards across at its widest point, although it is deep enough for boats. Not a place where you would expect a shark attack.

Twelve-year-old Lester Stilwell and four friends decided to go swimming off an old steamboat pier called Wyckoff Dock. Lester was a good swimmer, stronger than most of his friends. On hot days he loved to swim in the creek, to float along looking up at the blue, blue sky over his head. He loved the feel of the hot sun on his body, how it warmed the water close to the surface, and underneath the layer of warmth he liked to feel the cooler water.

July 12 was a very hot day. Lester floated just a little away from his friends. Suddenly he felt something big hit him and drag him down under. He struggled frantically to get back to the surface. He felt agonizing pain searing through his body. He got back to the surface, screamed, took in one breath, and felt the big something grab him and drag him down, down, down.

Meanwhile, Lester’s friends thought he might be having a seizure, since he had a medical condition in which he had seizures now and then. They began shouting for help. Some men came running, stripped off their clothes, and dived in to help Lester. One man, Stanley Fisher, found Lester and dragged him to shore. He was either unconscious or dead.

Standing in waist-deep water, Fisher felt something big and powerful bump his right leg and excruciating pain enveloped him. Not knowing what had hit him, Fisher yelled, staggered, and dropped Lester’s limp body back into the water. He felt for his leg with both hands, but his right thigh had been ripped off from hip to knee. His own blood swirled in the water around him, and he fell unconscious into the water. Other men got him to shore and carried him to the Matawan railroad station. Two hours later he arrived at a hospital, but it was too late. He died from his wound.

Others gathered Lester up from the water and carried him to shore, laying him on the bank. When they knelt beside him, they found that he was dead.

Before the end of that day, yet another young boy was attacked by a shark which bit off most of the flesh of his right leg below his knee. He was rushed to a hospital where doctors saved his leg and his life.

The wave of attacks set off a frenzy of shark sightings, with men searching the waters for sharks. Two days later in Raritan Bay, New Jersey, a great white shark was caught, killed, and dissected. Inside his stomach they found human bones and flesh, but no person could be identified from the remains.