The Leatherman and Me

The Leatherman at one of his regular stops.

Two weeks ago, I was sitting at the bar in the Time Out Market in Lisbon when I got a call from old friend John O'Neill telling me that the New York Times Magazine had just published a long essay on the old Leatherman. The piece is a leisurely, beautifully-written piece by NY Times writer Sam Anderson that wanders, as such a subject is want to do, through history, legend, geology, geography, culture and personal introspection.

John O'Neill, Paul Kellogg and Doug Orr survey a shot during the Leatherman doc production in 1984.

I know what happens when you start considering The Leatherman because in 1984, with the aid of O'Neill and several other friends and colleagues from the CT Chapter of what was then the International Television Association (ITVA), I made a 30 minute documentary about the legendary wanderer.

I'd been keeping a file on the Leatherman for years. I'd hiked to a few of his local caves, but when O'Neill suggested our group make a documentary to stretch our wings beyond the corporate videos we all created, I was all in.

A year of deeper research followed, visiting historical societies, spending hours in the state library, searching for stories about the wandering legend without the benefit of modern web-based resources. I wrote a script and then we spent six months of weekends filming around Connecticut and New York using a grant from the Connecticut Humanities Council, and finally produced The Road Between Heaven and Hell, a half-hour documentary, that, for decades was the most authoritative version of the Leatherman story.

Then came Dan DeLuca, and his own obsessive, complete and even-more-authoritative book on the topic.

It took me a lot to shake my own obsession. I wrote a four hundred page novelization of the story, which has not been published, but it was enough to purge the Leatherman from my system.

First page of the novelization.

And now Sam Anderson picks up the baton. The Leatherman gets under your skin (pun intended). Just reading Sam's essay makes me want to hike out to the cave in the hills of Maromas.