- Date Of Birth: August 28, 1920
- Date Of Death: November 24, 2017
- State: Colorado
Richard Everett Doherty passed peacefully at age 97. “Dick” came from Quaker and farming roots, an only child born in Chicago and raised in Illinois and Indiana, by his mother and his grandparents, after he lost his father to illness at age 3. His father, Everett, was a chemist and his mother, Grace, an English Literature teacher.
As a youngster, his 4th grade teacher turned him onto music and his 5th grade teacher onto astronomy, passions he pursued the rest of his life. As a senior in high school, he was selected to take part in the National High School Orchestra, held in St. Louis.
During WWII, he served from 1943-46 in the 112th Cavalry in the Pacific—New Guinea, Philippines, and Japan. He was in the first wave to occupy Japan. He and three other troopers, one of whom had smoker’s cough, once were surrounded overnight by Japanese soldiers. They hid in a bush while Japanese soldiers buried their dead nearby and the American soldier with smokers cough miraculously suppressed it. Every year for decades, on the anniversary of that night, Dick and his family toasted his luck.
Marrying in June 1946 in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and honeymooning in New York City, he and “Kath”/”Kay”, an art teacher, started their life together in Illinois, in and near Chicago, with Dick working for Wurlitzer Music Retail, later for Sears, and eventually starting his own business as a manufacturer’s rep selling manufacturers’ products (records, instruments and electronics) to retail outfits. Daughter Barbara (later “Josie”) and son Charles were born in 1949 and ’51.
Dick loved spending time with family and friends, taking his young family on vacations to many national parks, and traveling extensively for decades with the love of his life (Hawaii, Alaska, Portugal, Italy, Venice, the UK, France, South America, Germany, Greece, Turkey, New Zealand, Australia, and Mexico.) A life-long musician, he played woodwinds in bands, musicals, orchestras, and ensembles from his teens to his 90s. He always enjoyed a walk in the woods, backpacked two weeks with his son in the Wind River Wilderness, and at age 60 started devoting more time to hiking. Moving to Colorado Springs at age 62, he often said he was “a kid in a candy store,” surrounded by 14’ers in the Rocky Mountains, half of which he summited, along with the entire 490-mile Colorado Trail over the course of three summers, finishing at almost age 77, in a total of 37 hiking days.
He was preceded in death by beloved wife Katherine in 2011. He is survived by children Josephine Jones (Colorado) and Charles and wife Marla Doherty (California), three grandchildren, Ben Jones, Amanda Doherty, and Malina Gillies-Doherty and three great-grandchildren, Sophie, Everett, and Eleanor (California.)
