By Leonard Serratore | The Adventure of Lenny and Scotty

I want to tell you something about the moment I decided to write this book.

It was not a dramatic moment. There was no lightning bolt, no single afternoon where everything clicked into place. It was more like a slow realization, a growing understanding that the story I’d been living for six decades was actually worth telling. Not because my life is extraordinary in some Hollywood sense, but because of one particular truth at the center of it:

Two boys grew up in the same county in New York. They never met. They shared the same dream. And fate brought them together, decades later, at precisely the moment it mattered most.

That’s not fiction. That happened. It happened to me. And when I retired from 37 years of airport management in July 2022 and started what I call “a new adventure,” I knew the first thing that adventure had to include was putting that story on paper.

The Adventure of Lenny and Scotty is a book for young readers. But the story behind it, the real story, the lived-in, worn-around-the-edges truth of chasing a dream across a lifetime, is something every person, at every age, can recognize.

What It Really Means to Have a Dream

We use the word “dream” so casually that it’s lost some of its weight.

But there’s a difference between a wish and a dream. A wish is passive. You make a wish, and then you wait to see if it comes true. A dream is active. A dream is the thing that wakes you up early and keeps you up late. It’s the thing that makes the hard days worthwhile because they’re pointing toward something.

For Lenny and Scotty, for the two boys I’ve based this story on, aviation wasn’t a casual interest. It wasn’t something they tried on and put down. It was a compass. From the time they were children, it pointed them in a direction, and they followed it through every obstacle, every detour, every year of preparation that stood between them and the sky.

I have met a lot of people over my career who gave up on their dreams before they had a chance to find out whether those dreams were possible. Not because the dreams were unreachable, but because the path was longer and harder than they expected, and nobody told them that’s normal.

It is normal. The path to anything worth having is long and hard. That’s not a reason to turn back. That’s just the terrain.

Growing Up With an Obsession

I grew up in the Village of Nyack, New York, on the west bank of the Hudson River. It was a wonderful place to grow up, a small, tight-knit community with character and history. But what I remember most about my childhood isn’t the town. It’s the sky above it.

I assembled model aircraft. I read everything I could find about aviation. I watched planes fly over and tracked their shapes, the way they banked, the way they climbed. I didn’t just want to be near airplanes. I wanted to understand them. I wanted to be part of that world.

My family wasn’t wealthy. Aviation wasn’t a field that felt automatically accessible to a kid from a working-class background in a small New York town. But the dream didn’t care about any of that. Dreams are remarkably democratic in that way. They don’t ask for your credentials or your bank balance. They just ask: are you willing?

I was willing. And that willingness, more than any natural talent or lucky circumstance, is what led me to Florida Institute of Technology, to my degree in Aviation Management and Transportation Technology, to a 37-year career that took me from Westchester County to Broward County to Palm Beach County, building something I was genuinely proud of.

The Handshake That Changed Everything

There’s a moment in the book, and in real life, when Lenny and Scotty finally meet. They have been on parallel tracks for decades: same county, same dream, same fire. And then, at the exact same airport, at the exact same moment, their paths cross.

A handshake. An introduction. A recognition.

I don’t want to give away all the details; that’s what the book is for. But I will say this: when I experienced the real version of that moment, it stopped me cold. The universe had been quietly arranging things for decades, and I hadn’t known it. Suddenly, looking at this person whose journey had mirrored mine in ways neither of us had planned or predicted, I understood something that’s hard to put into words but that I want every young reader of this book to carry with them:

The people who are meant to find each other will find each other if they stay on the path.

That’s not mysticism. It’s the practical result of pursuing a calling with consistency. When you dedicate yourself to a specific world, you move through it more and more deeply over time. And the further you go, the more likely you are to encounter the people who share your dedication. The aviation world is large but surprisingly connected. If you love it enough to give your life to it, it will introduce you to the people who feel the same way.

What I Wanted Young Readers to Understand

When I sat down to write this book, I had a few things I really wanted to say, not as lessons, but as truths embedded in the story itself.

First: dreams that are shared between strangers are real. The fact that two boys from the same county, who never met, spent their childhoods chasing the same dream is not a coincidence to be explained away. It’s evidence that certain callings are bigger than any one person. Aviation called Lenny. It was called to Scotty. It calls to young people today who look up at the sky and feel something they can’t name.

Second: preparation is a form of love. Every hour Lenny spent assembling models was a love for the dream. Every hour Scotty spent sketching aircraft was a love for the dream. The universe doesn’t reward wishful thinking. It rewards the people who show up, put in the work, and refuse to stop. Preparation is not the boring part of chasing a dream. It is the dream, taking shape.

Third: the sky is not the limit, it’s just the beginning. I put this in the book because I mean it literally and figuratively. In aviation, the sky is where the journey starts, not where it ends. And in life, the moment you achieve one dream, you find the horizon has moved. There’s always more sky ahead.

Retired, But Not Done

I retired in July 2022. And I want to be honest about what that word meant to me.

Retirement from a career isn’t retirement from life. It isn’t retirement from purpose. I spent 37 years serving the airports of New York and Florida. When that chapter closed, the question wasn’t “what do I do now?” The question was “What’s the next adventure?”

The answer was this book.

And after the book, more books, more stories, more ways to put a dream in the hands of a child who needs to see that someone lived it before them and made it to the other side.

That’s what Lenny and Scotty are, at their heart. It’s not just a story about aviation. It’s a story about the kind of life that becomes possible when you decide, somewhere in childhood, that your dream is worth taking seriously.

I decided that. Scotty decided that. And somewhere out there, a kid is looking up at the sky right now, and deciding the same thing.

This book is for that kid.