THE LEONARD STORIES
Harold Leonard, our Grandma Lola’s first husband, represents a full quarter of the DNA that makes up Don, Dick and me. And yet we know very little about him – only that he was an auto mechanic from Kansas City, and that he may have served as an ambulance driver at the French front during WWI. Sadly, we have no photos of him, but ir he did serve, this is what his ambulance and uniform would have looked like.
In our early explorations of Mom’s maternal relatives – the Bishops and the Cummings – we pretty much ignored her father’s story, not only because it was painful to Mom, since he disappeared before she was two, but also because we didn’t know and couldn’t find much about him. Even a 1900 Kansas City census account – which might have been Harold and his parents – told us very little.
In my childhood I’d learned a nursery rhyme style litany of all of the nationalities that were supposed to be me: English, Irish, Scotch (sic), Danish, German, Lithuanian, Portuguese and Italian. The first four were clearly our Bishop and Cummings ancestors and the last two obviously Ferrari and Thomas. But the German and Lithuanian we didn’t talk about. So that had to be Mom’s father – Harold Leonard. Since we couldn’t find enough information to develop a story and because what we did know, we didn’t especially want to know, well, Leonard just got ignored.
But when I restarted this research – and thanks to the internet – I learned that even if you have little knowledge of a particular person, you can know a great deal about the time and places in which that person lived. So I got to work on Kansas, Germany and Lithuania in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the hopes of learning more about our grandfather, and maybe even his parents. And I was fascinated with what I found.
Because we knew that Harold was an auto mechanic – it said so on Mom’s birth certificate and Lola had confirmed this – I looked into the automotive history in Kansas in the early 20th century. And I discovered that Henry Ford had built his first branch assembly plant in Kansas City. It was a huge plant which included offices and a repair shop, in addition to the assembly line. It was completed in 1912 and almost immediately began churning out 100 units per day of the “Tin Lizzy”, and so was certainly a source of jobs for young men like Harold, who would have been in his early 20’s. Moreover, I learned that the Ford Motor Company built 5,745 ambulances for the Allied Powers, and another 107 for the Red Cross, during WWI. Whether he ever worked for Ford, and how, or even if, he became an ambulance driver we may never know. But these are certainly compelling coincidences.
From Lola’s account what we do know is that Harold had a violent temper and that if he’d been at the French Front that he certainly would have been mustard gassed. We also know that Lola met him at a skating rink, that he loved to skate, and that they married within a year. So it doesn’t sound like he was displaying signs of neurological damage or what we would now call PTSD when they first met. Still it is my hope his violent temper was a delayed reaction to the effects of being gassed and to the horrors he may have experienced at the front, and not that he was violent by nature. But whatever the cause of his temper, Lola would be forced to leave him in order to protect her two young children. And once she did he was never heard from again. We aren’t sure what happened to him but there is a record of someone who could have been him, dying in Los Angeles in 1928. Again, we have no photos of him, but when you consider our Mom’s stunning beauty, her great legs and passion for fun – well, he must have been something else!
Mom’s brother, Harold Jr. shows a resemblance to Grandma Lola, which you can see in these two photos. It is a resemblance that Mom doesn’t share. Nor does Mom much resemble her maternal grandparents. For this reason I think that she’s the strongest clue to what Harold Leonard may have looked like.
And just as there is a look of shy fear and sadness in so many of Lola’s photos so there is in these photos of Harold. So he may have inherited much of her character – which is explored in her story.
We also know that he got the full wrath of his father’s rages. According to Lola he was regularly beaten and even thrown against walls. And Mom said that when they were in foster care in Minneapolis that he had to be sent to a farm in the countryside because the family that took care of them couldn’t handle him.
I only met our Uncle Harold when he was in his late 50’s or early 60’s. My mother had kept her distance from him most of their lives. After they returned to Los Angeles – when she was 6 or so and he was 8, she resented the time and money Lola would give to Harold she wouldn’t give to Mom. Lola surely understood – in a way that our mother couldn’t have – the extent of what her brother had suffered at the hands of his violent father – and what Mom had most probably escaped – at least physically.
And as adults, Mom continued to avoid him. In her words he was always in trouble – in and out of prison and even mental hospitals and that he only came around when he needed money. But as angry and upset as she was about her brother, years later she was happy to reconcile with him. He had married a very kind woman – I think she was a nurse or social worker – whom he’d met perhaps while in recovery from alcoholism. This woman contacted my mother and succeeded in befriending her so much so that Mom was willing to attend their wedding. And sometime later I was able to meet him and his new wife in a lovely visit with Mom. Here are photos of that visit (soon to be uploaded).
This reconciliation with her brother occurred long after Mom’s and my genealogy hunt. So Mom was feeling much better about her family altogether and I believe that this allowed her to have compassion for a brother she’d resented so much and for so long. And for my part their relationship helps me better understand how lonely and painful in so many ways our mother’s childhood had to have been – especially whenever I’ve felt tempted to blame or criticise her for not being what I thought should have been a better mother to me and my brothers. She was in truth a devoted Mama Bear, who loved us deeply and from whom we all inherited enormous strengths, a passion for life and a raucous sense of humour.
We know even less about Harold’s parents. His father may have been a Kansas homesteader – perhaps of German origin – though the surname Leonard could be British or German. But he did tell Lola that his mother was Jewish and either German or Lithuanian, or both. We do know that Harold was born in 1889 so if his mother was from Eastern Europe, she would have had to make her way to Kansas sometime in the 1880’s – precisely when Jews were being subjected to brutal pogroms. If this was her story, did she travel alone? Many Jews suffering the pogroms moved heaven and earth to get their daughters to America, sometimes even as mail order brides. And if she was one, this might explain why she married a man who wasn’t Jewish at a time when she could have joined the many Jewish communities that were forming then in Kansas.
What follows only has meaning if this was indeed her story.
I cannot imagine we will ever know who Mom’s
paternal grandmother was or what her life was like.
But if she was a Jew fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe, then it is fitting to share the words of
Emma Lazarus, who wrote this poem, now enshrined
at the base of the Statue of Liberty,
precisely for people like her.
