Outer Banks fisherman cast retirement years in fresh light

NAGS HEAD

AS OUTER BANKS roots go, Everett Tate's were illustrious. His great-uncle, William Tate, wrote the letter to the Wright brothers that lured the inventors to Kitty Hawk, and gave them a place to stay. His grandfather, Dan Tate, the brothers' only paid employee, assisted the Wrights in their experiments. And Tommy Tate, his uncle, test-flew, albeit tethered, the brothers' gliders.

But Everett Tate, a commercial fisherman and artist, left behind his own impressive legacy.

In his long life, Tate, who died Tuesday at age 83, served in the Navy during World War II, and afterward, he served three years in the Coast Guard. His job as a captain on a shrimp boat in Charleston, S.C., led to him meeting his wife of 54 years.

Suzanne Tate, a popular children's author, said her curiosity had led her to ask Tate to take her out shrimping.

"And he agreed to take me because he didn't think I would show up at 3 a.m.," Tate said in a telephone interview. "But there I was." They were married two months later.

In 1961, the couple moved back to Everett Tate's beloved Outer Banks, where he opened a bait-and-tackle shop in Nags Head.

When he became the postmaster in Nags Head in 1967, he was known to file the mail while wearing his hip boots. He retired in 1984.

"That was always in his blood - commercial fishing," she said. "That was always there."

A primarily self-taught artist, Tate took up painting in the early 1980s after his wife gave him a painting class as a gift. Over the years, he produced compositions with bright, flat colors and shapes acclaimed for their stylized inner and outer worlds.

The Duck native painted from images he'd spied during his years on the water: "Green Flash" depicted the daybreak phenomenon he had often witnessed as a shrimper; "Portuguese Armada" illustrated a school of man-o-war that mimicked millions of clear sails.

His sense of humor was revealed in such paintings as "Doggone," where paw prints led to a smiling crocodile with a dog tail hanging from its mouth.

"It was folk art, but it was a modern type of folk art," Suzanne Tate said. It was bold and large, she said, and he was fascinated by outer space.

Tate said her husband had a stroke Saturday night at their Nags Head home. But he was healthy up until that day.

"I enjoyed his storytelling and his dry wit," she said. "He was a man of surprises."

Correspondent Mary Ellen Riddle contributed to this report.

Catherine Kozak, (252) 441-1711, cate.kozak@pilotonline.com