When my wife walked into Best Video the other day to rent a movie, one of the guys behind the counter asked her, "So, what's your huband's latest obsession?"
"The Leather Man," she quickly answered. "Actually, I think he would like to BE the Leather Man."
Obsessed? Not really. Very, very interested? Oh yes.
It is true I have visited his grave, but it wasn't really out of my way. Through serendipity he happened to be buried a literal stone's throw from my father's condominiun when he lived for a few years in Ossining, N.Y.
If you want to talk obsessed, you should spend some time with Dan W. DeLuca of Meriden. He has devoted the last 20 years of his life to finding out about this genuine eccentric who roamed from Westchester County to many of the towns in Connecticut from 1856 until 1889, when he was found dead in a cave in Mt. Pleasant, N.Y.
As I wrote in my Nov. 23 Register column, DeLuca has a book out about our favorite character. The title is "The Old Leather Man; Historical Accounts of a Connecticut and New York Legend." It's a compilation of newspaper articles about the fellow, with many maps and photos.
I didn't have space in my column to include an anecdote, mentioned in a 1984 Connecticut Humanities Council documentary on the Leather Man. Its title: "The Road Between Heaven and Hell: The Last Circuit of the Leather Man." It's very hard to find this film, but of course DeLuca has it, and he showed it at the Southington Public Library to a standing-room-only crowd of Leather Man enthusiasts. (Are they, too, obsessives?)
Anway, the anecdote, not yet confirmed by DeLuca's research, reports that our man in leather one day wandered into my town, New Haven, and, I am saddened to say, was treated shabbily. According to the documentary, "local toughs swarmed out of a tavern...liquor was forced down his throat." Apparently, the "toughs" thought that would be a swell way to get the Leather Man to finally loosen his tongue and spill the beans about who he was and why he was walking this precise circuit.
Well, it didn't work. It only frightened him and made him steer clear of the Elm City after that.
He didn't deserve such treatment. As DeLuca said, "He was never known to have stolen anything, or hurt or molested anyone."
That's why most people around here liked the Leather Man and treated him well. They fed him every 34 days when he appeared in their villages and at their doors. That's the way he should have been treated.
Man, don't I wish I'd been able to meet that guy! He would've been a difficult interview subject. But just think of all the high school French I could have employed!
All I have is that gravestone (with the name Jules Bourglay, which DeLuca says is the result of a phony story told to the Waterbury Daily American in 1884) and now, that fascinating book.
Who's obsessed?

Oh, the injustice of it! Studs Terkel, the ultimate liberal humanist, a Chicagoan, died on Halloween, less than one week before another liberal guy from Chicago, Barack Obama, was elected president.
Terkel was 96. He got the most out of every day, every year.
When my wife and I heard the sad news, we tried to tell our teenage daughters about Terkel. We told them, "He was the real deal."
Radio figure, writer, interviewer, story-teller, he did it all.
But he never drove a car. He got around on buses, chatting up everybody and listening to their conversations.
I feel so fortunate to have spent some time in the same room with him, nine years ago at Long Wharf Theater, where he attended a "symposium" tied to an adaptation of his book "Working." For that book he sat down with workers across the country and let them talk about their jobs.
When he got on stage that Sunday afternoon, he was wearing red socks and a red sweater. He always wore red.
He said he wrote the book to let people know "what it's like to be that waitress, that steelworker, that housewife."
Funny thing, ironic: he hated that famous scene in "Five Easy Pieces" which I always loved, when Jack Nicholson gets mad at a waitress who won't make substitutions in his order, so he sweeps the dishes off the table and stomps out of the diner.
"The kids in the theater cheered, and I was furious," Terkel told us. "I said, 'Do you know who that waitress is? Do you know how many Bufferins she had to take that day?'"
I had never thought of it that way.
He had a million stories. He told a few of them at Long Wharf. Listen: "I don't drive a car, so I wait for the bus with this couple. She's got her Vanity Fair, he's got his Wall Street Journal. I'm trying to make contact, so I say, 'Labor Day's coming up! I remember marching down (Chicago's) State Street, singing 'Solidarity Forever.'"
"The guy says, 'We loathe unions.' I ask him how many hours a day he works and he says, 'Eight.' I tell him, 'Guys got hanged or their heads busted so you could work an eight-hour day!'"
Terkel said this country suffers from "National Alzheimer's Disease." He lamented, "Nobody remembers what happened in the past."
He used a tape recorder for his interviews but he was always railing against machinery, especially computers and automated phone menus, the stuff that keeps people from talking to each other face-to-face.
And he told us the way to conquer apathy is through "a thoughtful citizenry."
That's just what was in action on Election Day. He didn't get to see it happen. I just hope he voted by absentee ballot.