Ty Harrington

Sailor, explorer and catastrophic emergency manager Ty Harrington has documented his life in words and pictures. After serving as the chief cook and steward of the Schooner Bill of Rights he was looking for a job cooking on a research boat to the Galapagos Islands National Geographic offered him a staff job and three months later he was in the Brazilian Amazon making first contacts with Stone Age Indians. Later he rode freight trains across the warp and woof of America, then mountain bike across India, went to the North Pole not with an expedition, but over-the ice with two Thule Eskimo hunters, a grant from George Soros sent Harrington to the far reaches of the Soviet Empire during the last days of the cold war to report about the conditions of tribal peoples of the USSR and then the same of America's Indians. In the early 1980's Ty Harrington was recruited by the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a reserve reports officer and as a reserve disaster public affairs officer and beginning in 1983 Harrington was deployed to both Washington, DC and field operations to provide federal coordination and assistance to the contiguous US, Alaska, Hawaii, territories, such as Guam, US Saipan and the US Virgin Islands, and treaty protectorates such as the Federated States of Micronesia.

Ty Harrington's writings and photography can be found on the web including articles relating to above experiences like North Pole By Dogsled available in the Chicago Tribune archives and his books here on Amazon:

The Sailing Chef is about Ty Harrington's experiences as an ocean cook including how to cook on a boat and recipes he gathered from cooks aboard the many other vessels he came into contact with across the seven seas.

The Last Cathedral is about the building of the National Cathedral on the highest point overlooking all of Washington, DC which has become a moral lighthouse for the nation. This is the story of the craftspeople who build this church wholly funded by gifts from private individuals of all faiths with no money from government nor from any organized religion, and services have regularly been held there for any faith in need of a chapel to hold services. They worked for over 80 years to build the tenth largest cathedral in the world without any structural steel and built a building the Nationa Bureau of Standards says will stand without maintenance for 2000 years. The built a resting place for presidents and humanitarians, carved the stories of America into it's walls, and wax murals made with lost techniques from Europe along with the last of the Gothic metalwork, huge grills with gates built on a blacksmiths forge from wrought iron with the look of silver, mosaics, entire room tiles so that entering the chapel feels like stepping inside a bejeweled box of precious stones. The stained glass changes with prisms throughout the day to the celestial voice of the largest of cathedral organs with pipes incorporated directly into the walls, and above there sounds both one of the worlds largest carillons with over 100-tons of bells and a full set of change bells whose full peal lasts eight hours and warning must be given first lest the good people of Washington, DC think it is signaling a national warning.

Maine, Our Northern-most State; America the Beautiful Series. They asked Harrington to write books on several states for their best selling series. But with limited time only for one, he picked his favorite, the first place the sun rises in the United States, the magnificent state of Maine! And one thing about Maine, the best thing, is that it is just as unspoiled in the land and the character of it's people as it was when Harrington canoed the rivers and rode the tides of it's rockiest coast and the book has the same timeless quality. It's a relaxed living history, good to read to school children, or as a primer before traveling there. Folks who live there say they like it too.

Never Too Old is a result of Ty Harrington and his mother Geri getting together to put together a handbook for training a caregiver to care for her parents in their 90's, and going on to provide a guidebook for do-it-yourself adults to dispel myths and enjoy life with confidence themselves. Envisioned for self-help or as a gift Never Too Old is a simple large-format soft-cover handbook for both the ideology and practice of an over-fifty adult; with nuts and bolts, like the truth about cholesterol, real estate, health insurance, nutrition and lots of advice about travel far and near.