Banty Rooster

Leon R. Smith was born into a poor family in 1931, but he never let his modest roots prevent him from chasing his dreams. He was like a banty rooster, which is a small fighting rooster with a feisty attitude-one that walks with its chest out, struts its stuff, and commands the attention of others. At seventeen years old, he joined the National Guard, and after joining the U.S. Army in November 1948 and completing basic training, he was sent to Japan, where occupation duty was a soldier's paradise. He spent twenty-five years in the Army, serving during the Korean War and jungle fighting in Vietnam. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he could never be fifteen minutes away from a telephone. If he received a call and somebody said, "cocked pistol," he had thirty minutes to start loading his unit on airplanes. After retiring from the Army in 1970, Smith owned small businesses and became a truck driver, traveling millions of miles across the United States and Canada.