Photographed on February 15, 2010, in Charleston, Miss.
John Atkins
Dan Prince
Jeff Carr
Fanny Haynes
Terry Dugan
David Brooks
Ferrell Alman and Ferrell Alman
Almans Ferrell, Ferrell, Mom & Olivia
Joan, Jim's niece
John Egerton
Libby and Stephen Bolt
Hunter Kay
I meant to take more, but eating, drinking and visiting got in the way.
Jim Leeson and Pete, photographed on October 10, 2008
From Alex Heard:
My friend Jim Leeson—to whom The Eyes of Willie McGee is dedicated—died earlier this week, in a manner that left hundreds of people who knew and loved him shocked and saddened but not completely surprised. Jim took his own life, and his body was found in the countryside close to where he lived, in a beautiful home he’d designed and built himself on a woodsy ridge south of Nashville, Tennessee. Part of Jim’s famously independent nature was a dread of becoming an invalid, of having to be taken care of and losing control of his own fate. He’d been suffering various health problems for a while, and he had a nagging sense that his memory was eroding, so he obviously decided the time was now. Many people who knew him assumed he might go out this way at some point. We just didn’t think it would be so heartbreakingly soon. . . .
http://eyesofwilliemcgee.com/2010/05/06/james-t-leeson-1930-2010/
From E. Tom Wood:
If you've never heard of James T. Leeson Jr., that's just how he wanted things.
Ask him about his role in the Civil Rights Movement, and he would steer the conversation from his own activities to the tragicomic foibles of people on all sides of it, white and black. Ask him about the neurotics, cranks, paupers and princes he mentored in Vanderbilt's Sarratt Tunnel as adult supervisor of the university's student journalists, and he could cite an instance when just about every one of them had shown his or her (usually his) ass. . . .
http://www.nashvillescene.com/pitw/archives/2010/05/06/a-man-in-full-jim-lees...