How Charlie Black met Shirley Temple was one of those chance meetings in life that might well not have happened, but for the surf conditions that day in Hawaii.

In 1950, Mr. Black was living in Honolulu and, by his own admission, was spending more time on his kapok and mahogany long board than he was in the offices of such firms as Castle & Cooke and Dole Hawaiian Pineapple.

One day, he called a buddy and said he'd been invited to a cocktail party, but wanted to check the surf conditions first. His friend, whose office had a view of the sea, looked out the window and said it was pretty flat, go to the cocktail party. Mr. Black did, and met the woman who would become his partner for the next 55 years.

Mr. Black died at the couple's home in Woodside Thursday afternoon of complications from a bone-marrow disorder. He was 86 years old.

His son, Charles Black Jr., said that over the past half a century his parents "didn't sleep apart from each other for more than a couple of days. They adored each other."

"He was the love of my life," Shirley Temple Black said Monday.

When Shirley Temple married Charlie Black in December 1950, she was 22 years old and known worldwide as the most famous child star of the age. Mr. Black was 31, the son of the president of Pacific Gas and Electric Co., and a veteran of the war in the Pacific.

In the eyes of the world, he was the man who married Shirley Temple.

How he dealt with this sudden immersion into someone else's fame -- historically, a treacherous situation for many -- was remarkable, his son said Monday.

"My own view is that the man was entirely centered," Charles Jr., said. "He seemed to know exactly who he was. When I was a young kid, I heard him called 'Mr. Temple.' Some men would have been bothered by it. He didn't react to it at all. He didn't care.

"As for my mother, she married my dad and found a man upon whose love she could count absolutely and he adored her and she knew it. She just blossomed."

Mr. Black was born in Oakland -- he descended from John Alden, one of the Mayflower pilgrims, and the Cherokee Indian chief Oconostota, his family said. He was raised in San Francisco, educated at the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut, and got his bachelor's degree from Stanford University in three years. He joined the Navy in 1941, and as an intelligence officer in the Pacific made more than 100 PT boat patrols -- the same kind of patrol for which President John F. Kennedy was storied. He also served as a scout behind enemy lines in Indonesia. Among several medals, he was awarded the Silver Star, one of the nation's highest for valor.

After the war, Mr. Black moved to Tahiti and, indulging his lifelong love of the sea, eventually sailed a small boat back to the United States over 7, 000 miles of ocean.

In 1950, while living in Hawaii, he met Shirley Temple at that cocktail party.

"We were introduced," she recalled Monday, "and he said 'What do you do, are you a secretary?' I said, 'I can't even type. I make films.' He wasn't too sure what I did. It was very refreshing to me -- a handsome guy who wasn't interested in Hollywood or anything about it."

Over the next few months, Mr. Black wooed Miss Temple, and eventually they were married at his parents' home on the Monterey Peninsula.

During the 1950s, after returning to the Navy during the Korean War as an intelligence officer, Mr. Black was an executive at Stanford Research International and Ampex Corp. but in the 1960s gravitated to what would become the bulk of his life's work -- aquaculture. Mr. Black co-founded a hatchery for oysters and abalone and later created Mardela Corp., headquartered in Burlingame, which conducted ventures such as catfish and salmon farming.

But Mr. Black apparently kept his hand in the world of spies, according to his son. Some time in the 1970s, he was involved with the operations of Glomar Explorer, the deep ocean-drilling ship that was chartered by the CIA to attempt to raise a sunken Soviet Golf-II ballistic missile submarine which had sunk in 17,000 feet of the Pacific Ocean in 1968.

Mr. Black was also involved in his wife's career as a U.S diplomat. In 1969, Shirley Temple Black was named by President Richard Nixon as a member of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations. In 1974, President Gerald Ford appointed her ambassador to Ghana, and in 1976, Ford appointed her chief of protocol in the State Department. Mr. Black accompanied her on these assignments.

In addition to his wife, of the family home in Woodside, Mr. Black is survived by a brother, James Black Jr. of San Mateo; two daughters, Susan Falaschi of Menlo Park and Lori Black of San Francisco; a son, Charles Black Jr., also of San Francisco; and a granddaughter, Teresa Falaschi of Menlo Park.

More than 50 years ago, in Honolulu, Mr. Black wooed Shirley Temple with a Tahitian love song. Last Thursday, she said, she sang the same song to him as he lay dying.

At his request, there will be no service.