R. Leonar

Collected writings over a three-year period of one man's journey with pancreatic cancer. Leonard's appreciation of the small things and the little pleasures in life will help everyone put things in perspective as you go through your busy life.

Leonard was born in Shelby, North Carolina in 1949, the first member of his family to be delivered in a hospital. He lived the first twenty-three years of his life in Cliffside, NC, a mill village. His parents and grandparents all worked in the cotton mill, as did he in the summers while in college and for a year after graduating -- he said it was the longest year of his life. He learned as much there as he did in school, things he never could have learned in a classroom. Leonard published his first novel, ＂Soul of Clay＂ in 2010. While the characters in the novel are fictional, Soul of Clay is based on his experiences growing up in that mill village in North Carolina in the 1960s. Music was a keen interest of his - not an avocation, but a passion. He listened to and collected rock and roll, blues, rhythm and blues, jazz, and classical music all of his life. In 1975-76, he hosted a show, Progressive Sampler, on South Carolina Educational Radio. He played rock and all its hybrid off-shoots and talked too much, as he was under the impression that was what people did on educational radio. He was married to a wonderful woman who he met over thirty years ago when she was a summer secretary for the Department of Mental Health. When asked where they met, they always smile and say ＂at the State Hospital.＂ They had no children. That was intentional. They always had cats and dogs. That was intentional, too. Leonard retired after thirty years of social work with the Depts. of Social Services and Mental Health. When his attention was not diverted by the mundane chores that go with living, he wrote, read, listened to music, gardened, and watched the birds from the gazebo.