A Man and His World and a Time
That Survives Only in Memory
With impressions and recollections from a quieter time, Tony's World: The Recollections of a Pilot, a Sailor, an Ice-boater, a Skier, a Bobsledder, a Winemaker, a Museum Director--and a Natural Storyteller, by William E. "Tony"Doherty, remembers the sites, daily occurrences, people, and vitality of one man's life. Most of his life--nearly eighty years--was spent in Hammondsport, New York, on Keuka Lake. Tony's World is Tony Doherty's memoir, with an introduction and edited by Charles Champlin, his cousin and life-long friend.
From the start Tony was an adventurer with unstoppable energy and interest. This lively spirit stayed with him all his life, well into his later years. He was a pilot in World War II and then after the war a sailplane sales executive. As a child he was full of initiative and intelligence as he constructed an Adirondack lean-to with his uncle, a treehouse with his brother "Boog," and a divebell with his pal Jack Horne. At an early age he began to sail, bobsled, ski, and climb, and he continued these demanding activities well into his later years. He also became a professional winemaker and then a winery executive, and for several years he was the director of Hammondsport's Glenn Curtiss Museum of Local History.
Tony Doherty was an adventurous man, and this spirit of adventure was with him even as a boy: when he was almost six, he and his younger brother Duane derailed a mine train at a salt works in Louisiana. Among Tony's many gifts, he was a wonderful storyteller, with a memory for details, people, and events, and the legend of the derailing is only one of the tales in this delightful memoir. Some of the events are nervewracking, and some are delightfully amusing, but all are told with a self-effacing and nonchalant delivery. His account of being an accidental eyewitness to the link-up of Russian and American troops on the Elbe river during World War II, when he was a transport pilot on the look-out for potential landing fields, is another remarkable story, both funny and hair-raising, a rare close-up of history in the making.
Doherty writes of his lively and often risky pursuits in an affectionate and anecdotal voice. There are also vivid portraits of the colorful people who were close and important to him, including his father, the dashing pioneer aviator "Gink" Doherty. There are warm tributes to pals from his boyhood and wartime colleagues and acquaintances (high brass included), and a host of Hammondsport characters and friends, like the eccentric violin-maker Graham Palmer.
His recollections are an informal, personal, often moving and unforgettable record of a time in American life that only survives in memory.
Tony Doherty and Charles Champlin, who assembled and edited the manuscript, were first cousins who grew up across Lake Street from each other. Champlin later became a writer and correspondent for Time and Life magazines, and from 1965 until he retired in 1991 was the arts editor and columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He and his wife Peggy live in Los Angeles. |
