Toni Taylor

Toni Taylor was born in 1946 in Palo Alto, California. She attended the University of Colorado, Boulder from 1964 to 1966, and San Diego State University from 1966 to 1970. She has had twenty-nine nursing jobs in six states and Brazil, Saipan, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, and Peru. She studied for her master’s in child mental health nursing in Salt Lake City, Utah, and returned to finish the second year after sailing to New Zealand on the Shearwater, a110-foot ancient teak schooner. She hitchhiked from the Bay of Islands to the small island below the southern island, named Stewart Island, and had limpets (aquatic snails) that she picked up on the shore for lunch.

In 1973, she sailed with the Project Hope organization on the refurbished SS Hope to Maceio, Brazil, and worked with Brazilian nurses, caring for patients onboard.

For the last eight years of her career, she taught nursing at San José State University and Cabrillo College, and on the weekends, she commuted to Monterey to work in the psychiatric unit. Her grandma, Myrtle, told her she had to pay off her mortgage before she retired. So she worked seven days a week, and on her birthday in 2011, she wrote the last check.