With handshakes, hugs and his golden retriever Hobson at his side, Wiscasset’s Bill Phinney welcomed those he called his faithful friends to the Wiscasset Yacht Club on August 10.

“Ready for the party,” Donna Waterman told him as she raised her fist in the air outside the club. He was glad for the enthusiasm, and glad the day had come for the event he said he wanted to have to celebrate his life, and celebrate the people who have supported and encouraged him.

Phinney has been diagnosed with an incurable, acute leukemia. He has decided to have interim chemotherapy while it helps, then hospice care.

“This gathering goes far beyond our dad,” daughter Jodi Phinney said at the microphone, on the club’s back deck facing Sheepscot River, where her father once kept sheep on White’s Island.

“It’s a tribute to these many people. How better to honor you, than in storytelling and his being alive to celebrate it all together?”

Jodi Phinney and her father’s friends said a celebration sounded like something he would do.

“The minute I got the invitation, I said, ‘Yeah, that’s Bill,’” Kurt Swenson said.

An accomplished landscape designer, Phinney made friends of his clients, or as one guest described them, Phinney’s “flyover victims.” He would appear with aerial photographs of their properties that he could transform.

“Forever, it will be there,” Dr. Phillip George said about the work Phinney did on his property.

“What you did for us, we will pass on to our children,” George told him.

Suzanne Rankin sang Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top” to Phinney. She recalled his persuading her to write histories of sites in town, for the Museum in the Streets project.

“He’s so charismatic that when he talks to you about doing something, you find yourself saying, ‘Yes, I’ll do that,’” Rankin said earlier.

Phinney amassed thousands of photographs for the project, by asking people for them, she said.

When Phinney addressed the group, Hobson still nearby in her decorated collar, he recalled his boyhood attending a one-room schoolhouse in Arrowsic; and, years later, being on a trip to Boston when he saw many empty chairs that had been set up for the news media. He didn’t know what the presentation would be about, but he sat down. “Before I knew it, I was singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ with Martin Luther King.”

Phinney also reflected on his 1975 project in Bath, creating that city’s waterfront park. “That’s 39 years ago, and it’s going to live on in perpetuity,” he said. “That’s neat.”