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?