It was good meeting James “Woo” Leatherman last week. Woo, 5-foot-5, unassuming and ever cheerful, is 101 years old, which is worth a “Woo Woo!” or two.
He refused to have me address him as “Mister Leatherman.”
“No, sir, that’s my daddy,” he said.
Leatherman’s daddy was Leroy S. Leatherman, a shoe salesman, and his mother, Aline Dugger Leatherman worked on weekends at an Alexandria jewelry store. He said they were great parents who taught him to be “truthful and honest and to just behave. They didn’t put up with no crap.”
His family moved from Alexandria to live in Tyler, Texas for a while during the Depression, but they returned to Alexandria, where he went to school at St. Francis Xavier Cathedral, then Bolton High School, where he graduated in 1943.
Like a lot of youngsters during the Great Depression, Woo had to work. At more than one job, too.
When he was 12-13 years old, he was a paperboy, delivering The Town Talk newspaper. He can still recall with clarity the different routes he was assigned over time, each one being a larger expanse with more responsibility. His final, biggest responsibility during the Depression was the Sonia Quarters, then a working-class community where some residential properties were first built in the area around streets like Wise and Turregano.
“I’d deliver 350 papers a day on my bicycle on that route,” he said. “The Town Talk had no Sunday paper then.” He fondly recalled “catching” the papers as they came off the press and folding them before heading out for deliveries. Around New Year’s, you’d take the (employee) card they gave you and go around to customers for tips and say, ‘Happy New Year!’ One highlight was just making friends. I still have friends from the Sonia Quarters.”
He later delivered papers to soldiers during the 1941 Louisiana Maneuvers at nearby Army camps, conducting large-scale military exercises that trained over 400,000 troops for World War II. He and a buddy were in the back of a delivery truck on the way to one of the sites when another vehicle collided with it.
“We rolled over two times!” he said. “They told us the newspapers packed so tight surrounding us saved us. For a while they thought the driver was dead,” he laughed, “but he was OK. He just got knocked out. And the upshot is, after all that, we went on and delivered papers to the Maneuvers the rest of the day.”
Woo also remembers working on Saturdays at Wellan’s during the Christmas season opening doors. He also worked with a tailor who worked for that family-owned department store, sometimes working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., taking clothes by foot a few blocks from the store to the tailor and back. “I’d help him measure out some of the pants and alter them.”
Asked what he did when he wasn’t working, he proudly recalled being part of the “Murray Street Sluggers,” and he was a pitcher on that youth baseball team that had no adult supervision. No coaches. No uniforms. No elite all-star teams. “We had a blast,” he said.
“They had a field on the corner of 16th Street and Murray,” he said. “It was a vacant lot. Every year we’d cut the grass. The people just let us play there.” He and his teammates got the supplies needed to build backstops. He recalls being part of a league with four or five teams. “Harold McSween (future U.S. Representative) had a City Park team and Paul Delacroix had an Enterprise (subdivision) team. After the games, I’d get together with two or three others, and we’d put together a write-up and we’d put it in The Town Talk.”
Woo pitched for the Sluggers (Bolton High School did not have a baseball team at the time) for a few years, and a Town Talk report from the team’s Opening Day game on April 12, 1941 revealed Leatherman got 15 strikeouts in a 14-9 victory over the City Park team.
“I had a pretty good curve ball and a pretty good changeup,” he said, remembering George Allen, Horace Pringle and Wallace Voltz as some others who played in the league. The games were usually played on Saturday mornings, “and some people stopped their cars and watched us play.”
Leatherman graduated from Bolton in May of 1943, and he was drafted four months later during WWII. He also got married in November of that year to Juanita Pharis, and they had four daughters and a son, and she was known as “MeMe” to their 10 grandchildren. They were married for 60 years. But that long marriage might not have happened had he been drafted into the Army.
“Since I got a 110 on a test, I qualified to be in the Air Force instead of going into the (Army) infantry,” he said. “I flunked out of pilot school, where I was scheduled to be a tail gunner on a B-17 (bomber). I had an old sergeant by the name of Maroni, and he asked, ‘How’d you like to be my clerk? I said, ‘Cut those orders, man.’”
So he was a clerk/typist for the remainder of the war, although in various locations, both overseas and in the States. He did get to be part of a C-47 transport plane mission over Iwo Jima about a week after the Marines raised the flag there on Mt. Surabachi. He took a picture from the plane of the mountain, and it was mostly covered in black volcanic ash. He also “happened to meet up with” three fellow Alexandria natives serving in the military — John L. Wilson, Kirby St. Romain and Robert Fant – and they had a picture taken of the four of them at the Iwo Jima monument.
Leatherman worked various jobs after returning from the war but eventually worked for Standard Life Insurance and later started his own insurance business. His son, James, started working with him three years before he retired, and then took over “and he’s doing a good job.”
I asked Woo how he got his nickname, and he said, “I don’t know exactly, but one of Dad’s fishing buddies gave me that name. It seems I was making sounds that sounded a lot like ‘woo.’”
As for any influential people in his life, he answered, “Sister Agnesita, from the Sisters of Divine Providence,” from his years at St. Francis Xavier Cathedral School. She taught every course for his class and brought the class on a picnic “every year” to the CCC camp.
At 101, it’s amazing how sharp Woo is and that he can still drive and his health is generally good.
“I’ve got a lot of arthritis in my neck that hurts all the time,” he said. “But I eat just about whatever I want to. I take a sleeping pill and sleep good at night.
“It’s been such a good time,” he said of his 101 years. “I’ve got a good family. It’s been a good life.”