When
Audrey Dean Leighton passed away in mid-2005, East
Texas lost one of its most entertaining and colorful characters.
With
his chest-length beard, red shorts, boots, gaudy hats and shirts--and his trademark
twirler’s baton--Leighton roamed all over East
Texas, appearing in parades, entertaining old people in nursing homes, and
showing up unexpectedly at community events.
As a self-proclaimed “Global
Twirler,” Leighton performed on the sidewalks of New Orleans, New York, Washington,
Los Angeles, Phoenix, Seattle and cities in France, Italy, Spain and Sweden.
People
laughed and snickered at his antics, but he had a deeper personality and a mind
as sharp as a college professor.
He was the valedictorian of his high
school class, marched as drum major of his high school band, played a saxophone,
and was a child of privilege--a descendant of one of Hemphill’s
oldest and richest families.
Most people didn’t even know his name; he
was usually called “The Twirler.”
About a year before his untimely death
to bone cancer, he and I sat down at a Hemphill
gift shop and talked about his life. I found Leighton to be one of the smartest
men I had met in years.
Leighton said his parents divorced when he was
an infant and he rarely saw his father. When his mother passed away, his only
ties were to an aunt and a handful of distant cousins.
So, supported by
a family trust fund, he traveled to his heart’s content and did what he pleased--always
with a twirler’s baton spinning in the air.
Leighton had no permanent address, but the closest was a single upstairs room
in the old Pratt house at Hemphill.
It was his mother’s bedroom. He lived there until the Pratt heirs sold the house
to the First Baptist Church.
Without a home, Audrey usually stayed at
motels in Hemphill and San
Augustine. He also expanded his wanderings, leaving his possessions in a trunk
at a friend’s home in Hemphill.
He hitched rides with friends, traveling all over the country.
Leighton
claimed he could communicate with the deceased and often walked over to Hemphill’s
cemetery to visit with what he called “my old friends and relatives.” He added:
“Those Pratts are as tight-lipped in death as they were in life.”
Leighton
was tight-lipped, too. He refused to give interviews to journalists. However,
a few days after his death, Emily Taravella of the Nacogdoches Daily Sentinel
produced a warm, insightful feature story about “The Twirler.”
Leighton
would have been proud that his story appeared on the front pages of the Sentinel
and the Lufkin Daily News.
When Leighton died, his trust fund had
just enough money left to cover his cremation.
His last wishes were that
his ashes be sprinkled all over the world, in keeping with his own outlook on
life--“Travel around and make people happy.” His friends complied with his wishes.
Bob Bowman's East Texas
August 21, 2009 Column
A weekly column syndicated in 109 East Texas newspapers
Copyright
Bob Bowman |
