“I didn’t particularly like that,” Doherty recounted, “but my wife had told me a week before that she was pregnant. He called his contact at Pocket, who told him that they had a local sales position at Pocket in Philadelphia. That job didn’t last long: he was laid off after 9 months when the distributor lost a major client. Lacking the qualifications to edit, he found a job with a magazine distributor, which had picked up a large contract with Pocket Books, covering Northern New England. So when I got out of the Army, I looked for a job in publishing.” “I got to thinking: this is what I really like to do. He ended up at Fort Polk, Indiana, in fire direction control as an artillery man. And you don’t explain to the Army that you’re losing weight for the Air Force. If you’re solid, you don’t go from 232 to 178 between March and May. “They told me ‘No problem, just lose the weight.’ In those days, I was solid. Doherty was also over the required weight for flying. However, upon graduating, the war was winding down, and the Air Force cut back on their recruiting efforts. As the Korean War raged throughout his time at college, he had anticipated a career as a pilot. Doherty had been a member of the school’s Reserve Officer Training Corps and also played college football. When I got to quantitative analysis and beyond, I began to figure out the micrograms, and that this was more than I really wanted to know about it-as far as spending my life doing it,” Doherty said in a recent interview.Īfter abruptly switching majors, he found that the only thing that he could graduate with was a degree in Philosophy.

I enjoyed chemistry until quantitative analysis-it was always interesting to see what the compound was composed of. “I had won a science award in high school.

His father’s work inspired Doherty, who decided to attend Trinity College as a chemical engineering major. Throughout the war years, Doherty’s father was an engineer for Pratt & Whitney and was part of the team that designed the country’s first jet engines. He took to the magazine quickly and then began to branch out, eventually reading other magazines like Galaxy Science Fiction. His grandfather and mother read to him as a child, and when he was old enough to read on his own, they got him a subscription to Astounding Science Fiction. From an early age, he was introduced to reading. Tom Doherty is its founding father.ĭoherty was born on April 23, 1935. Since its inception, Tor Books has become one of the biggest names in science-fiction publishing.

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