Looking Back 12 Years, Former Trainer Had a Real Whale of a Time

It’s been 12 years since Larry Lawrence hugged a killer whale, but “I think about it every day,” he said.

“I used to lay out at the side of the pool, and Newtka would come up and put her cheek right up against mine,” said Lawrence, a Huntington Beach restaurant owner. “She would stick out her tongue, and I would rub it. She liked that.”

Lawrence caught the killer whale and four others in the ocean off Vancouver.

“She was my favorite,” he said. “I would stay with the whale 24 hours a day when she was sick.”

Newtka means “little woman” in Eskimo language. “It was an experience I’m glad I went through, but I really miss it now,” he said.

“I’m working 15 hours a day, six days a week,” he said of his stressful restaurant business. “When I trained the whales, I would have two days off a week, but that’s the sacrifice you make having your own business. A restaurant I owned in Texas broke up my marriage.”

If he tried to pursue working with whales again, “I don’t know if anyone would be interested in me,” said Lawrence, who claims that he was the first to ride a whale that went 40 feet down in the pool and came up over a 10-foot hurdle, sometimes through a fire ring.

He said he made his first whale jump at Sea World in San Diego.

“Today the people who put on the shows want young people in front of a crowd,” said the 40-year-old Huntington Beach resident who has been on the Johnny Carson “Tonight Show” to relate his exploits, which included putting his head inside Newtka’s mouth.

Although he feared the whales, “you had to get control of them from the very start,” said the Vietnam veteran, who answered an advertisement to help train dolphins and killer whales after his discharge from the Army in 1968.

“You can’t let them get away with anything,” he said, “or they will dominate you. There’s no telling how intelligent they are, but they are wild animals and could turn on you at any time.”

Although he said it was more an accident, he ended up with 145 stitches in his left leg when Newtka raked him with her teeth.

“Something scared her during a show,” he said.

Besides Sea World, Lawrence worked in whale shows in Texas and Florida as well as at the now-defunct Japanese Village in Buena Park.

“I really got attached to the whales, and I think the whales can show emotion, too,” he said. “I went to Sea World in San Diego a few years ago just to visit Newtka, and as she passed by, she stopped and looked at me. I think she remembered me.”

Lawrence has pictures hanging on the wall of his Bread Crumb restaurant as a reminder of his earlier days as a whale trainer.

“It was an exciting experience, and I miss it,” he said. “When you were out in front of the crowd and heard the applause, it made you feel like you were a movie star.”

Next year’s Orange County Fair will have the theme of “Very Berry Extraordinary,” which will salute both strawberries and pigs.

A 300-pound Yorkshire-Hampshire crossbred pig, named Shortcake, will be the mascot and will be the central character among the estimated 500 pigs that will populate the fairgrounds July 11 through 22, according to spokeswoman Jill Lloyd.

Acknowledgments--Dennis Klapthor, 11, a sixth-grader at Lathrop Intermediate School in Santa Ana, was honored by both the Santa Ana Police Department and the Santa Ana Unified School District for identifying a car break-in suspect that led to his arrest the same day. He received the school district’s Medal of Honor, the third ever awarded, and a certificate from the Police Department.