Town and Country Resident Pens Childrens Book

Town and Country resident William Tyler has been writing most of his life. As the vice president of advertising for Pizza Hut, he wrote ads trying to persuade people to order pizza. Throughout the last 18 years as a Saint Louis University professor, he has written dozens of academic articles on marketing and advertising. Now, with a decidedly younger reader in mind, he has penned Who Let the Mongoose Loose?

Tyler’s love for writing was apparent well before he was doing it professionally. When Tyler was a child in Elizabethton, TN, he started his own version of a newspaper, which he wrote, copied (by hand) and distributed to his neighbors. The paper included an original comic strip, foreshadowing his current endeavor.

Tyler’s dad was an electrical engineer and felt that his son should follow in his footsteps. And his son tried to do just that. 

“I ended up at Iowa State for architectural engineering,” Tyler said. “But that rapidly disintegrated because of physics and calculus and all that kind of stuff.”

Tyler left the engineering program at Iowa State to study at University of Iowa. He planned on eventually enrolling in that school’s famed writing program, but the Korean War interrupted his education. When he got out of the service he decided to study journalism at the University of Missouri. He said that although the idea of using his journalism degree to travel the world writing for National Geographic was appealing to him, he decided instead to get married his senior year and go into advertising. 

He worked in advertising for more than three decades in St. Louis and California and a few places in between, but no matter where he worked, he said, his speciality was always coming up with catchy rhymes.

Even though  a lot of his rhymes became advertising slogans heard by millions—"Ask any mermaid you happen to see, what’s the best tuna? Chicken of the Sea," is possibly his most well known—Tyler would also write little plays for his children’s Boy Scout troops, and on birthdays he would write verses of congratulations for family and friends. Tyler said that when he worked for advertising agencies he would write his memos in rhyming verse and get flack from the other department heads for doing so because the employees would only read his memos and ignore the other, nonrhyming ones. 

“I’m a natural rhymer, so I write in verse. Rhymes just sort of come to me, and I think ‘Well what will I do with this?’ so I write it down, or if I’m driving, I ask my wife to write it down,” Tyler said.

Who Let the Mongoose Loose? is full of Tyler’s rhymes. “What’s so bad that the snake seems to shake and shiver as he slithers?” opens the story. The book tells the story of a mongoose who drops in on a North American forest, setting the native wildlife “all atwitter.” Ultimately, the book conveys the lesson that it is foolish to be afraid of what you don’t understand.

Tyler said he wanted to write a children’s book for a variety of reasons, one being that he had to do something with the rhymes that kept popping into his head. But he also wants to do what he can to get young children enthusiastic about reading.

“Reading is something you don’t want to lose to all the new technology. It is extremely important. The little slogan in my head is ‘Future leaders are early readers.’” he said. “Now I don’t want to force 2, 3, 4 and 5-year-olds to read. I want to them to enjoy reading.”

Tyler’s interest in young people's enthusiasm about reading is spurred in part by his own grandchildren, who, Tyler said, make a great test audience to help him determine rather something is going to work or not. And even though Tyler himself didn’t follow in his father’s footsteps, Tyler’s son Dan has. Dan Tyler is an abstract painter as well as the illustrator of Who Let the Mongoose Loose?

The father-son writer-illustrator team have another, Christmas-themed book nearing completion. They hope to have it available by Thanksgiving if not sooner. 

Who Let the Mongoose Loose? is available online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and direct from the publisher Trafford.