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

He was born in Massachusetts and spent his earliest childhood years in New Orleans, where his father sold Curtiss aeroplanes, but for the rest of his nearly eighty years, home base for William E. "Tony" Doherty was the lovely village of Hammondsport, New York, on Keuka Lake, one of the deep, clear, glacier-carved Finger Lakes in the western part of the state. Tony was a man with an exceptional appetite for life and adventure, and the appetite stayed with him all his days; he was skiing, windsurfing and ice-boating well into his seventies. He was a wartime pilot (and in postwar years a sailplane sales executive). As a lad long before that, he'd been a kind of Tom Swiftian constructor of tree houses and a diving bell, and in a rigorous life he was also a sailor, a skier, a bobsledder, and a climber of glens. He was a professional winemaker and winery executive and for several years the director of Hammondsport's Glenn Curtiss Museum. His adventures started early: when he was barely six, he and his even younger brother Duane managed to derail a mine train at a salt works in Louisiana. It is one of the many tales in his delightful memoir. For, among his gifts, Tony was a superb storyteller, with a prodigious memory for people, events and details. Some of the adventures are the more hair-raising for his mild, nonchalant, even self-effacing 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 checking out potential landing fields, is another remarkable story, at once funny and tense, a rare close-up of history in the making. Doherty writes of all his lively and often risky pursuits in the warmly anecdotal reminiscence. There are vivid portraits of his colorful family, with a notable account of his father, the dashing pioneer aviator "Gink" Doherty. There are affectionate tributes to boyhood pals and to his wartime colleagues and acquaintances.