Ruralite Cafe: Published 04/03/03

By Lynn Hotaling - Associate Editor

Leo's book offers history, humor

With his only published volume in its third printing, Leo seems more than a little embarrassed by his book's success.

That's because he never intended to write a book when he started scribbling his stories on yellow legal pads six or seven years ago. He was just jotting down stories to pass the time while recovering from hip surgery.

He assigns most of the credit (or blame) for the volume's existence to his eldest daughter, English teacher Sandy Murray of Florence, Ala.

"I just wrote that stuff out longhand," he said. "Sandy collected it all and translated it and got it published."

"It really is hard to decipher his writing, but I grew up working in the pharmacy," Sandy said. "Besides, I'm an English teacher, and I have to read all kinds of handwriting.

"I think the stories are pretty good - they're humorous," said Sandy. "I think he was more interested in preserving his memories for his family than in writing a book."

Leo, now 80, grew up on East Fork in Savannah community, the third of six children of the late Delia Hall and Royston Cowan. Many of the book's stories take place on East Fork, and the volume is liberally sprinkled with real Jackson County names and places.

Most of the stories are exactly as Cowan wrote them, his daughter said.

"I did very little editing. It's what he wrote," Sandy said. "The interesting thing to me is he writes just one draft. He composes it in his head, and then he puts it down on paper."

Among the book's offerings is a Depression-era Christmas story.

"Most people here couldn't tell much difference during the Great Depression - it wasn't much worse than it was before," Leo said. "Most people here didn't depend on a weekly check."

Leo also contributes his recollection of one of Jackson County's biggest disasters - the 1940 flood - as he describes how he and his sisters and cousins, three of them students at Western Carolina Teachers College, tried to get back home. They were all safe in the end, but East Fork's flood-swollen waters swept away their panel truck.

In his acknowledgments, Leo also credits a good friend, retired English teacher Nancy Potts Coward of Webster, for encouraging his literary endeavors.

"I'm so honored that he included my name, but all I did was appreciate (the stories). The only thing I ever did was read his stories and say, 'Leo, you must get these published,'" Coward said in December 1998, when Leo's book first came out.

Leo's stories are not tightly organized, but she regards that as a strength, Coward said.

"Leo talks as things happen," she said. "Life doesn't go in any order - it just keeps piling up."

Coward said she thinks the most striking thing about the book is that it "pictures a way of life that simply doesn't exist anymore."

In one story, Coward said, Leo describes the Christmas he first discovered why his father and the other men kept slipping out to one of the outbuildings - because that's where the liquor bottle was hidden. Back then, she said, no one would dream of having alcohol inside the house.

Leo's stories are "perfectly honest" and demonstrate "amazingly complete recall," Coward said.

"The locale is the mountains," she said, "and while that is admittedly special, it's not just about the mountains - it's about the closeness of families. It's great."

I'd have to agree. For those of us who know Leo and have enjoyed his stories through the years, the book reads like he's sitting there telling them.

When Leo tells the story of his brother Lloyd's efforts to secure funding for a headstone for a deceased relative whose grave is unmarked, he includes a description of the way Lloyd prepares a typewritten document. The dead-on accuracy of his words struck a familiar chord here in the newsroom, where we have received a number of Lloyd-penned documents.

"(Lloyd) wrote letters on an ancient Underwood typewrite that had a half-red/half-black ribbon. He used both colors with abandon, and he used all those little things on the top row of the keyboard. Those letters had words that were underlined, capitalized, hyphenated, dashed and double-clutched. There were so many quotation marks that the pages seemed to be having a major flea attack. If you held one of those pages at arm's length, it looked like a miniature Jackson Pollock painting," Leo wrote.

If you misssed Leo's book the first time it came around, you have a chance to remedy that situation.

Back by popular demand, "It Was This Way" is available at Eastgate Pharmacy, now owned and operated by Leo's son Kim; at City Lights in Sylva; and at Oaks Gallery in Dillsboro.

Back to Archive: 04/03/03.