Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
Aaarrh!
Well, that may not be spelled right. Ol’ Chumbucket didn’t spell it out; but given its definition, the spellin’s no doubt close enough.
It means pretty much anything you want it to mean, and you might be wantin’ to get used to it because some local pirates might be using it come Sept. 19, International Talk Like a Pirate Day.
Ol’ Chumbucket, aka John Baur of Albany, stopped by the library’s summer reading program for teens on July 19 to give a lesson in Pirattitude and how to talk like a pirate.
Baur and Mark Summers, aka Capn’ Slappy, the Pirate Guys, are the founders of Talk Like a Pirate Day.
“Four years ago, I was just this normal guy, a normal dad,” Baur told about 30 persons at the library. He and Summers were playing racquetball to get in shape when one of them let out something along the lines of “Arrr!”
One thing led to another, and they began incorporating the language of pirates into their game.
They decided the world really needed a new holiday, Baur said.
“We don’t play racquetball any more. We just talk like pirates. It’s a lot more fun.”
They selected Sept. 19 for their holiday, Baur said because it was Summers’ ex-wife’s birthday, and “it was stuck in his head.” Every other date they could think of was taken up by events like Christmas or the Super Bowl. Since this date wasn’t doing anything any more, they picked it, and they knew who they needed to get to promote it: Dave Barry, the syndicated humor columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner.
For the next seven years, they celebrated the day pretty much on their own. In early 2002, Baur chanced upon Barry’s e-mail address, and they wrote to him.
“He wrote a column, and we thought ‘that’s our 15 minutes of fame,'” Baur said. “Except the thing kept growing.”
They thought maybe they should write a book, Baur said, and “my wife got tired of listening to us talk.”
She e-mailed some literary agents and received a response. Only thing was they didn’t have a book yet. The agent told them they had 10 days to write the book, “Pirattitude.”
Plenty of books talk about pirates, Baur said, but not so much on “how” to do it.
Once you learn how, “you’ll want to talk like a pirate all day long,” Baur said. “It’s fun. It’s infectious.”
In the last couple of weeks, with the release of the new “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie, the two have been interviewed by USA Today, the Satellite Sisters, the Oregonian and many others.
“Sometimes you pick the wave,” Baur said. “Other times, the wave picks you.”
“When we sat down to write (Pirattitude), we didn’t have anything in mind except to have fun,” Baur said. “I’ve been doing this full time almost two years. Yes, the savings are almost gone.”
They were not looking for new careers, Baur said. “We just opened ourselves up to the possibility.”
Much of it “is my wife leading us through the door,” Baur said, but “a lot of these things came from being open to the possibilities. If you open yourself to life, life has a habit of coming and kicking off its shoes and making itself comfortable….
“The world is out there, even here in Sweet Home or down in Albany. It can apply to you.”
That doesn’t mean they will become pirates, Baur said, “but I hope you will on Sept. 19. Drive your teachers crazy.”
Baur worked at Oregon State University as a science writer until his position was eliminated by budget cuts. He previously worked for the Albany Democrat Herald. Summers is a counselor with the Linn-Benton-Lincoln Education Service District.
More information on the Pirate Guys can be found at talklikeapirate.com. Their book is for sale through amazon.com.