1663-35 Art Deco/Preservation WED SEP 15 1982 ED: FINAL
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: 1D LENGTH: 947 MEDIUM
ILLUST: bw: Leicester Hemingway
SOURCE: JOE STARITA And ARNOLD MARKOWITZ Herald Staff
Writers
DATELINE:
MEMO:
' I HAVE TO GO PLACES, ' HE HAD CONFIDED
Leicester Hemingway, like his famous brother and their father before
them, could not accept a life reduced to pain, old age and despair.
His wife, Doris, said Tuesday she should have realized something terrible
was about to happen when her husband seemed so determinedly buoyant.
Alone in their Miami Beach home on San Marino Island, Hemingway, an avid
fisherman, writer and conservationist saddled with diabetes, a bad heart and
hardened arteries, put a . 38- caliber Smith & Wesson to his temple about 3
p.m. Monday. He was 67 .
His wife found him sprawled in the foyer, shoeless and shirtless, wearing
a pair of beige shorts, the weapon nearby, one shell expended. There was no
note.
Twenty-one years earlier, his older brother Ernest Hemingway, the
celebrated Nobel Prize winner, also faced deteriorating health. He killed
himself with a shotgun at his mountain home in Idaho.
Their father, Clarence, a physician despondent over diabetes and angina,
put a gun to his head at the family home in Oak Park, Ill. , in 1928 . Ernest
was 29 . Leicester was 13 .
"Leicester was so angry that his body was failing him and he couldn' t do
anything about it, " his wife said. "It might have happened sooner, but he
didn' t want his family to live with suicide. He had lived with that and it
wasn't easy. "
Last March, Hemingway' s poor circulation required an artery implant in
one leg. In April, a second artery implant was needed in the other leg.
His diabetes worsened. Prostate problems surfaced. He lost 70 pounds in
less than five months. Doctors said he might lose one leg.
To Hemingway, the author of six novels, the father of four children, a
religious man who had come and gone as he pleased since age 19 when he built
an 18-foot boat and sailed across the Gulf of Mexico to Cuba, the prospects of
recovery appeared bleak.
"To do what I do, you have to be able to go places, " he told Andy Taylor,
a former United Press International reporter and family friend.
"What good am I gonna be if I can't even walk across the street?" he said
while recuperating from surgery earlier this summer.
Born April 1, 1915, in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Leicester was the
youngest of six children. Like his only brother, Ernest, 16 years his senior
and the author of The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man
and the Sea, Leicester was gregarious and had a sense of adventure.
At 20, Leicester Hemingway joined The Chicago Daily News . Later he wrote
for The Inquirer and Record in Philadelphia and the North American Newspaper
Alliance. He was freelancing in the Caribbean when World War II broke out, and
reported to U.S . Naval Intelligence on German submarine activity.
In 1943, he enlisted in the Army and filmed the invasion of Normandy and
the Army' s northern European campaign.
But fishing and fishermen, boats and the sea, and the Bimini Islands of
the Bahamas were his passions. Through the decades that Bimini served as a
don' t-miss carousing stop for fishermen, Les Hemingway was Alice Town' s most
devoted hanger- out.
He was a one-man tourist attraction, standing on the docks under a floppy
straw hat or cork pith helmet, snapping pictures of arriving yachtsmen for
publication in the Bimini News.
He billed the paper as the largest in the western Bahamas -- actually the
only one for a long time -- and the smallest in the world with a format of 8
1/2 by nine inches.
Hemingway knew everyone on Bimini, and everyone knew him. But in recent
years, with dope and alien smugglers haunting the islands, Hemingway
encountered more than a few who did not want their photographs taken.
Although the character of Bimini may have changed, the Character of Bimini --
Leicester Hemingway -- did not.
"I think Les puts his friendship with Bimini above anything else. He
loves that place and the place loves him, " said Dr. Howard Engle, a Miami
Beach pediatrician and close family friend.
There was, even if not always seen by his Bimini cronies, a serious side.
"He ' s a character, yes, but you see a deeper side of a person when he' s
got a life-threatening illness, " Dr. Engle said earlier this year. "He joked
about it, but he was a little frightened, like anybody else. "
Sunday, Hemingway went to church with his wife and daughter. Outwardly,
he was cheerful and talkative, lingering over coffee and rolls and small talk
after the service.
"That should have been a sign, " Doris said. "I should have known
something was wrong. "
As she left for work Monday morning, Leicester called out that he would
see her later.
Then he asked to borrow a neighbor' s gun, saying he needed it for
protection.
Engle recalled: "Les often mentioned that Ernest had made the decision
and that we had to accept. He often told me that if it ever came to that
point, he hoped I could accept it as his friend. "
Hemingway is survived by his wife and daughters Anne Hemingway Feuer, 24 ,
of Miami Beach, and Hilary Hemingway, 21, of Miami. He had two sons by a
previous marriage: Peter, 41, a psychology professor living in Regina,
Saskatchewan, and Jake, 44 , an engineer in Silver Spring, Md.
Two sisters also survive him: Sunny Miller of Petoskey, Mich. , and Carol
Godner, who lives in New Hampshire.
A funeral service is scheduled for 11 a.m. Thursday at St. John' s-on-the-
Lake United Methodist Church in Miami Beach. Interment will be private.
ADDED TERMS: obit
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