Contributed by Martha Smith andCary Lafaye
Ellison Smith, author of The Day the Pelican Spoke , grew up in Columbia and graduated from Dreher High School in 1961. He attended the University of South Carolina where he majored in English. He graduated from USC Law School in 1969 and moved to Charleston in 1974. He has lived on Sullivan’s Island for 29 years.
In 1997, a good friend and Smith spent a week fishing at a small Mayan fishing village, Punta Allen, located at the head of Ascension Bay in the Sian Kaan biosphere reserve in Mexico. On the last day of the trip, the story, or rather a vague outline of the book, began to take shape.
Two years later, Smith was spending several days by himself on a houseboat behind Cape Island at Cape Romain and wrote this story as a present for his granddaughter’s eighth birthday. She is now 13, and he thought it would be a nice gift to publish it and give her the first copy.
Cary Lafaye, a longtime friend of Smith’s says, “I have read the book and found it to be a delightful story about a 12-year-old boy who rescues a talking pelican. It is obviously fiction but contains a lot of real information about the importance of being good stewards of our environment and of the creatures we share it with.”
Copies of the book can be ordered at Amazon.com by typing in the title or the name of the author. The cost is $15.95.
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