By Edie Clark

From the February 1985 issue of Yankee.

Roy Foote is 85 and his memory is fading. There are times when he doesn't even recognize his old friends, but mention the Leather Man and his eyes light up as if on some distant beacon, and he'll say in a voice barely audible, "You never could tell about the Old Leather Man. There was always something new to know about him."

Roy Foote still lives on the farm where he was born in Middlebury, Connecticut, a town not more than ten miles from the path of the Leather Man, the legendary beggar who trudged a wide circle through southeastern Connecticut and western New York State during the late 19th century. The Leather Man died ten years before Roy Foote was born, but his legend and the mysteries of his life came to mean a lifetime's search for Roy Foote, who otherwise spent his life as a banker. In his house, which he and his wife Sarah built on the south comer of his father's farm just after they were married in 1934, Roy Foote has accumulated closets full of information and stacks of photographs. He also has a large collection of memorabilia such as a tin pipe and a hatchet he says once belonged to the Leather Man. Roy has devised a suit of clothes that he believes is a close replica of the Leather Man's cumbersome and peculiar leather pants, leather jacket, leather shoes, and leather hat.

The Leather Man never spoke for himself, for the most part leaving his riddle to Roy Foote to puzzle and piece together, the way he did the Leather Man's suit, a crazy quilt of leather scraps boldly stitched together with leather thongs. On Halloween Roy used to put on the Leather Man's suit, his shoes, and his roomy hat, which fit like an upside-down pot, and shoulder his great big leather bag. Leaning on the walking stick he made to look just like the Leather Man's, he'd open the door to greet surprised trick-or-treaters.

In the section of Connecticut where Roy and Sarah Foote live, the story of the Leather Man is an oft-told one. It has been written up as books, and it's been included in countless anthologies of New England lore. " Hundreds of people have written the Old Leather Man's story," Sarah Foote points out, "and not just in books and magazines. The students at the school, generations of them, used to come here and talk to Roy, and then they'd go back and write up their term papers about the Old Leather Man. In that sense it's a story that we all share. And of course, Roy has written about him countless times. When people want to know about the Old Leather Man, they always call up Roy."

Most recently, his story was made into a film that was shown by Connecticut Public Television last fall. Ed McKeon, who wrote and produced the film, says that when he first started work on it, he had only a small file. In his research he kept coming across Roy's name. And often the source of other people's stories was Roy Foote. "I'd be interviewing someone and it would all sound like firsthand information. Then I'd say, 'Gee, how do you know all this?' and the person would say, 'Oh, Roy Foote used to come to our town and talk about the Leather Man.' "

It was in the early forties that Roy and Sarah first heard about the Leather Man. Lifelong nature lovers, Sarah and Roy spent a lot of their weekends cave-crawling — spelunking as it came to be called — which took them down on their bellies, crawling through underground streams and squeezing through dark rock alleys, their path lit by their headlamps, in hopes of coming out into a cavern or discovering some of the unknown beauties of the underground world. On a weekend excursion, Roy and Sarah and another of the group stopped under a ledge, and their companion told them the story of this mysterious, silent tramp who slept in caves and walked on an unwavering course through more than 40 towns from Essex to Greenwich to Ossining, New York, to New Fairfield to Middletown and so on, the endless circle. The loop was said to have been 365 miles, and it took him exactly 34 days to make a complete circuit. Punctual as a banker, he'd show up at the same place 34 days later, mutely asking for something to eat. No one knew who he was; he never spoke a word.

Roy was deeply intrigued by the story of this mute cave dweller. Sarah Foote recalls that "the story of the man was more interesting to him than the cave." He was a survivor who had lived through 32 New England winters, living in what Roy knew to be shallow caves, not much more than rock overhangs, until his face froze during the Blizzard of '88, causing a cancer that eventually killed him. (This storm, which killed hundreds and turned New England upside down for weeks, delayed the Leather Man only four days.) He was but a tramp among thousands during that rough, scrappy period in New England's history, yet a tramp so endearing that special legislation was passed to exempt him from stern new laws that called for bizarre and cruel methods of eliminating beggars from the landscape.

He was a man who had no known roots, no name, no reason for his peculiar and almost eerie trek, and yet a man of apparent principles. He never took money; he never accepted clothes or charity of any kind except food. If he was ridiculed or jeered at, he never returned to that place; and in spite of his forbidding appearance in his voluminous outfit, he brought harm to no one. To find out more, Roy began by asking the people who owned the land around the Leather Man's caves what they knew about him. They told him they'd mark the Leather Man's arrival on their calendars and sometimes bake something special that day. Roy found that people often had a picture of the Leather Man in their family album and that sometimes teachers would let classes out early if it was the time when the Leather Man, who was gentle with children, was due to arrive. One interview led to another or sometimes two more.

Roy found that each person who had known the Leather Man had his own story and that it differed from anyone else's. "When I was growing up in the forties and fifties, we spent nearly every weekend going out on interviews," Roy's daughter Lynn Boyle recalls. "Dad would spend hours sometimes talking to people who had fed the Old Leather Man or whose mothers had fed the Old Leather Man along his route. Mother and I would always go along — sometimes we'd take walks or sit under a tree outside. Or sometimes we'd sit in and listen. Dad would take notes and then as soon as we got home he'd go upstairs and transcribe his notes on his typewriter. In his files he has written out hundreds of interviews with people who remember the Leather Man."

With so many stops along such a long route, there were hundreds who knew the Leather Man, and as Roy Foote gradually began to discern, there was also more than one Leather Man — there were three. At least, there were three identities presumed to be his: Jules Bourglay, Randolph Mossey, Zacharias Boveliat. Roy kept separate file drawers for the three identities and continued his research, more intrigued than ever. Knowing that, he began to feel that there were two different men, one of them an imposter. "Roy knew by the way people talked which one they were talking about. Randolph Mossey dressed like the Old Leather Man and followed roughly the same route, but he came along after the Old Leather Man died," Sarah Foote explains. "He didn't come round as often and he spoke. He even did odd jobs. Except for the clothes, he wasn't really anything like the Old Leather Man. We think that he was simply trying to cash in on a good thing." The other two stories were up for grabs, one as convincing and well substantiated as the other.

"It's like the Bible," Sarah Foote says. "There are lots of different versions. You choose for yourself which one you want to believe." Roy and Sarah Foote chose, without doubt, the story of Jules Bourglay.

Though the source of the story is unknown and though they twice wrote to Lyon, France, inquiring if there ever was such a person as Jules Bourglay and both times they were told there was not, Sarah and Roy Foote never lost faith in it.

Ed McKeon included the version of Jules Bourglay in his film. Yet, having spent a year researching these and other versions, and having relied heavily on Roy Foote's information, he says he doesn't believe that version for a minute. "There are so few facts. I don't know that any of the versions could be proven. The one I prefer is that he was the son of a wealthy man and fell in love with a poor girl who was murdered. That would better fulfill the idea of penance. It makes more sense."

But legends survive not because they happened but because of the telling. Most people prefer the story of Jules Bourglay, perhaps because it is true or because they want to believe it is true or because Roy Foote popularized that version. It is the story he took out on the road with him as he and Sarah gave countless lectures and story hours on the Old Leather Man. It was an hour-long presentation which he enhanced with slides he had taken along the Leather Man's route. There were pictures of the many caves where the Leather Man slept and pictures of some of the places he was known to have stopped, plus reproductions of pictures of the Leather Man (of which there were more than might have been expected — merchants offered them as sales gimmicks to gullible customers).

Though Roy had told the story thousands of times, each time he gave the talk he told it as if it were the first time, his eyes animated, his voice full of tension. At the end he'd surprise the audience — who were sometimes people in old folks' homes, sometimes members of historical societies from towns along the route, and sometimes children in kindergarten — by having someone dress up in his Leather Man's suit and shuffle down the aisle to the front of the room. Some people came again and again to his rural kind of vaudeville show. Roy's daughter Lynn came with them often and says now that she rarely tired of hearing the story. " It was as if he was part of the family. For me, while I was growing up, the Old Leather Man was like a real person."

The Leather Man was found dead in one of the caves in 1889. He was buried in a pauper's grave not far from where he was found in Ossining, New York. His grave was marked with an iron pipe. Roy Foote and others who called themselves Friends of the Leather Man joined in to have a grave marker engraved and installed. In 1953 the Leather Man received a head-stone which seemed to decide once and for all who he was. On the back side of a stone that had been carved for someone else and then discarded, is the epitaph: The Final Resting Place off Jules Bourglay/ of Lyon, France/"The Leather Man"/who regularly walked a 365/mile route through Westchester/ and Connecticut from the Connecticut/River to the Hudson/living in caves in the years 1858-1889.

Though Roy Foote can catch only a glimmer of what he once knew of this man that fascinated him throughout his life, he has left the bulging files, the suit and the pipe, and his daughter's good memory to carry on for him. And perhaps because of his tireless telling of the tale, the legend of the Old Leather Man may never die.

Ed McKeon's film calls on the expertise of a psychologist, a social historian, and a folklorist to explain the enigma of this sad and gentle beggar whose broken heart has, over the years, caught the sympathy of thousands; many, such as Roy Foote, never even laid eyes on him.

It has been nearly a hundred years since the Leather Man died. The Connecticut Historical Society recently held an exhibit in its museum in Hartford which lasted for two months. In a room richly paneled in rosewood and decorated in period furniture were the personal effects of a tramp, displayed behind glass. A mannequin with slender and refined face modeled a replica of the cumbersome leather suit, said to have weighed 60 pounds. On the wall in a gold-leaf frame was a life-sized oil painting of the Leather Man, and in glass cases were the things that have been found, believed to have once been his: his hatchet, crude as a caveman's; the big bulky leather bag in which he carried everything he needed, including a prayer book in French, dated 1844; a tin pipe rigged with a reed so that he could smoke the tobacco he gleaned from cigarette stubs and stogies. There was also a collection of newspaper clippings from the period during which the Leather Man lived, and an assortment of the different photographs which alternately showed a sad-eyed loner and a grisly madman. Though none of the news clips did, carefully worded placards told the story of Jules Bourglay. The exhibit, like the legend itself, was an odd patchwork of truth and fantasy. "Because, you see, it's not like any other legend," Sarah Foote explains. " It's not like Rip Van Winkle because this one is true. This one happened. Right here in our own backyard."

Ed McKeon's film is called The Road Between Heaven and Hell and is available for rent, subject to availability. Contact Laurie MacCallum, Connecticut Humanities Council Resource Center, 41 Lawn Ave. , Wesleyan Station, Middletown, CT 06457; 203-347-6888.