Biography
McCoy was born in Syracuse, New York in 1877. He had a brother Ben, five years older, and a sister Violet, five years younger. His father, also William McCoy, was a brick mason who had been in the Union Navy during the American Civil War, serving on the blockade of Southern coasts. Bill McCoy attended the Pennsylvania Nautical School on board the USS Saratoga in Philadelphia, graduating first in his class. He later served as mate and quartermaster on various vessels including the steamer Olivette, which was in Havana, Cuba when the USS Maine exploded in 1898.
Around 1900, the McCoy family moved to a small Florida town named Holly Hill, just north of Daytona Beach. Bill and his brother Ben operated a motor boat service and a boat yard in Holly Hill and Jacksonville . By 1918, having constructed vessels for millionaire customers that included Andrew Carnegie and the Vanderbilts among others, McCoy earned a reputation for being a skilled yacht builder.
Read more about this topic: William McCoy (bootlegger)
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“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)