Book Sale & Signing

John Boundy and John Robortella, two writers who grew up in Gates and who served on the Gates Volunteer Ambulance Service and the Gates-Chili Fire Department, will return home to join the Gates Historical Society for a pre-holiday book sale on Saturday, November 4, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., at the Gates Public Library, 902 Elmgrove Road.

            U.S. Air Force veteran John Boundy, a 1976 graduate of Gates Chili High School, who is both a past Gates-Chili volunteer firefighter, and medic and dispatcher at Gates Ambulance, is the author of Justice is Coming, a murder-mystery novel inspired by actual events with references to Rochester and Gates. It is the story of a small-town lawyer who squares off in and out of the courtroom with a doctor whose deceptions include private islands, luxury yachts, personal jets and a wealth which knows no boundaries.

            Several local history books by John Robortella, the past editor of the Gates-Chili News, will be available at the sale including the most recent Steps West: The Field Notes of Col. Hugh Maxwell which documents why the 1788 main survey line of western New York State veered to the west and created land ownership issues for those buying property in western New York and the Finger Lakes region for more than a century.

Among a number of other titles, the Gates Historical Society will feature Hinchey: A Pioneer Family’s Legacy in the Town of Gates which was released in September 2023 and is the first full-length work on the Hinchey family.

Now living in Texas, John Boundy graduated from U. T. Southwestern Medical Center and worked as a physician’s assistant prior to attending law school. He is now an assistant district attorney in Angleton, a city and the county seat of Brazoria County on the Texas Gulf Coast. When not writing, Boundy designs jewelry as a wire-wrapping artist. This will be his first visit back to Gates in several decades.

John Robortella, a 1969 graduate of Gates Chili High School, is the author and co-author of a number of Gates history books including Coldwater: An Eclectic History of the Hamlet (with Donald G. Ioannone). A former newspaper reporter and editor, he retired after a 32-year career at the University of Rochester and wrote the “Past Tense” Finger Lakes history feature which was published in both Canandaigua Magazine and Rochester Magazine. He is now working with the Gates Keystone Club Police Pipes and Drums on a 25th anniversary retrospective of the pipes and drums band.

The Gates Historical Society has a long list of books relating to the history of Gates which will be featured at the sale, such as The Biography of Rattlesnake Pete, Gates Revisited: Timeless Images from Family Albums, Frogleg George: The Legend No One Really Knew, and the Society’s first book Gates, a pictorial history of the town.