We have gathered today to celebrate the life of Don Leisey. I am Randy Leisey, the nephew of Don, in case you are wondering. Bev and I have traveled here from Cody Wyoming to join in this celebration of Don’s life.
Don Leisey was the youngest of four boys born to Alvin and E. Marie Leisey in Honey Brook, Pennsylvania. My father, Al Leisey, Jr, was the first born of that brood. I was born ten years after Don came into this world. Don had two other brothers who remained in Pennsylvania and were pretty much as successful as Don and my dad were in their professions. It was a nice family from whom they were conceived and encouraged. Leisey boys and girls were gifted with attentive parents and a positive outlook.
Don’s father, Al Leisey Sr, was a railroad conductor of freight trains in PA, and E. Marie was a stay-at-home mom trying to do a great job of raising her four very active sons. She was quite a woman! Her first name was actually Ethel and the boys referred to her as “Ethel High Octane!”
The woman could talk! Our family visited occasionally on Sundays, and she would talk and talk and talk and every once in a while, she would prod her husband and say, “Isn’t that right, Al?” And, my grandfather would always respond, without looking up, with four words: “What do I know?”
I loved our family! We were so Pennsylvania Dutch!
When grandfather had to work Saturdays, he would often take his boys with him, and they got a taste of what his life was like working in the caboose of a Pennsylvania railroad train.
Nice family!
Two personal instances of how wonderful Don was to be with in my formative years.
Don took me to one of his baseball games in those early years when my family still lived in Pennsylvania.
He never mentioned that he batted forth in the lineup. I had no idea he was a superstar. His batting swing was fast and strong. And he knocked one so far out of the park I thought it was surely going to land in Philadelphia, forty or fifty miles away.
On the way home from that game, we stopped at a gas station to get a soda. They didn’t have soda machines in those days; there were coolers with ice and cold water in them, and you reached down into it to get a soda. I got a Pepsi, but Don spotted a beer at in the corner of the container, and he grabbed that. He took it to the counter and the owner said, “You can’t have that! That’s my beer.” Don argued with him, and I just stood back and watched. “But it was in the cooler, he said! Isn’t that for people like me who are thirsty, Don asked?”
I just watched this encounter and said to myself “this Don Leisey guy is going places; don’t get in his way”.
Another memory I will never forget was at the hunting cabin in the woods that my father belonged to about 40 miles from Penn State, where he went to school. My father joined this group as a nice place to get away in the outdoors. We loved it. Fishing, swimming, an outhouse, running water that trickled down the mountain into a little pool that you’d use to wash dishes. It was so different from our usual life! We loved it.
The only problem was there was a skunk that lived under the cabin. My father disliked that skunk and always kept a twenty-two rifle in the building in the hope of getting rid of this skunk someday.
Well, we were just about to sit down to dinner one night when the skunk skittered across the front yard, and Don stood up and said, “I will get that skunk for you, Al”, and he picked up the rifle and chased it. We heard a shot, and Don came back, but he wasn’t smelling very well. My mother made Don eat his dinner on the front porch that night, promising to wash his clothes when he was finished. None of us dared to ask Don if his hunting was successful. It was just another day in the Leisey saga.
There are just too many stories to tell.
But I want to push on to another phase. Don never talked about his love life. He was a handsome man, but we rarely heard anything about him settling down. And he was somewhat beyond the time that Leisey boys usually introduced a woman into the family. But finally, we started hearing some stories about a certain woman he met on a plane. Word was she worked for the airlines. That’s all we knew (or all he was telling us).
I had two other grandparents who lived in Honey Brook; My mother’s parents. They owned a store across from the High School, and they had a big yard.
I was playing ball in the yard when Don drove up and said, “Hey Randy, I want you to meet my wife.”
What!!!? When did this happen?
Pat got out of the car, and there she was! The most beautiful woman I’d ever seen! I was stunned.
It gave me hope! I remember thinking “are Leisey boys allowed to have a wife this beautiful?” It changed my life and expectations for the future!
Don had come through again! God bless him!
Now here is where I’m a little uncertain about my telling you of the story of Don’s life. I knew that he and Pat had gone to California. I knew that he was going to use his educational skills and start a school. I knew that my father was taking time off at some point in this process to help him with this task, but I am sorry to say that I don’t know much about this time and the depth and circumstances of this mighty challenge and endeavor.
If we have anyone here who can fill in this space, I’d be glad to have you come forward and tell us more about this endeavor. There’s got to be some great stories. I only heard about one goofy story about my dad stopping to get a breakfast roll on the way to whatever he was helping Don with. It seems that he left the car running and unlocked and he went in the small store to get the pastry, but when he came out, the car was not there. It had been stolen! It wasn’t his car—it was Don’s!
I think there was a happy ending to that story, but Don loved to tell that story. His important corporate brother had Don’s car stolen!
Now certainly there are better stories than that to be told about Don’s entrepreneurial endeavors! Does anyone want to fill in the blanks for me and for us?
My dad raved about what Don was doing, but that’s about all I know.
The one thing I did know was that every time Don came back to the east coast, his wardrobes got fancier and more expensive! And I heard that he was doing marvelous things in the field of academics.
I’m sorry I never got to see what he had accomplished.
But despite all the good that he accomplished, I will always remember Don Leisey as the entrepreneurial wizard of the Leisey family. He made changes in the educational process that will help students accomplish marvelous things with their lives as well as just making life significantly better for others.
That, my friends, is a life well lived!
We shall sorely miss Don Leisey.