The first two-thirds of White Squall, the new adventure movie starring Jeff Bridges, is a coming-of-age tale about a group of teen-agers on a long voyage in the Caribbean and South Pacific.
Based on a true story, the youths were to spend a school year studying and working aboard a two-masted vessel, the Albatross. The idyllic experience turns tragic when the brigantine sinks in a freak storm.
Richard Langford of DeLand, a survivor of the May 1961 disaster that White Squall is based on, doesn’t plan to see the movie.
“I lost a lot of good friends on that trip. I don’t need any reminders,” said Langford, 70, a retired Stetson University English professor. “I had a number of dreams about it after it happened, and I don’t want to instigate that again. It was a traumatic experience for a number of people.”
Two of the five adults on board, as well as four of the 15 students, died. The dead included Alice Sheldon, a physician, biology teacher and wife of the captain, Christopher Sheldon; and the ship’s cook, George “Spook” Ptacnik, a particularly close friend of Langford’s.
Langford wrote a book-length manuscript on the voyage in 1961 as well as a first-person account of the disaster that appeared in Reader’s Digest in October 1961. The manuscript was published in serial form 25 years later in the DeLand Sun News.
Langford’s account of his narrow escape from the sinking Albatross is far more dramatic than anything shown in the movie. The “white squall,” which Langford thinks was a wind shear, knocked the ship on its side and sank it in less than five minutes. He had been reading in bed when the squall hit and was trapped below deck by rushing water.
“Later, some of us estimated that I had been carried down over 40 feet inside the doomed ship before I got out of her,” he wrote.
Langford had nothing to do with the movie. Although some of the characters’ names in the movie stayed the same, Langford’s did not. Actor John Savage plays an English teacher named McRae.
While the movie is a fictional version of what Langford lived through, there was nothing fictional about the white squall that destroyed the Albatross just three weeks short of its final stop in the Bahamas.
“We had been blown down in the water by a force that had given no warning, had not been seen, and that had left the area as soon as the ship was flat,” Langford wrote in his manuscript. “By the time I reached the surface and looked around for the ship, the violent squall was gone.”
Langford, who retired from Stetson more than 20 years ago, is a free-lance writer. Despite his near-drowning experience in 1961, he retains his love of the water. He lives by a lake and swims in it nearly every day.
