There, he raced as a jockey for a few years and met Bettie King, his relatives said. Stevens quit high school around age 16 and found various gigs grooming and training horses, landing in Hot Springs by the early 1950s. 14, 1928, in Hagerstown, Md., Leonard Stevens,an only child, decided to become a horse jockey when he learned that lack of height - he was 5-foot-4 - could be advantageous in equestrian sports, his cousin Ruth Holland said.Īs a baby, he was so tiny that his grandmother dubbed him 'little skeeter,' she added. 'I had to dig all the ditches and stuff.'īorn Aug. Later, the duo worked together for two years. recalled riding green Suzuki motorcycles with his father visiting places around the state, once going to the Buffalo River for a float trip. He was 'very particular about the way he looked,' she said.

His whole life, Stevens parted it, combed it to the side and 'kind of pressed it down,' Walker said. Stevens was also particular about his hair. Leonard Stevens and his children kept horses on 4 1 /2 acres around their white-frame house on Mabelvale Pike in southwest Little Rock. Walker's next 'emergency' was when her 14-yearold brother, Leonard Jr., hid her cereal. Afterward, the children were warned to call only for emergencies, according to the article. She called a house where he was attending a party every 15 minutes asking what he was doing. Walker, who was 12 in 1976, said in the article that she loved to pester her father when he left them some evenings. I am very lonely sometimes,' he told the newspaper in a profile on the family. It lasted 24 years, Stevens told the Arkansas Gazette in 1976.Įight months after his wife died of leukemia, Stevens joined the Little Rock chapter of Parents Without Partners, an organization for divorced and widowed parents. Stevens and his wife knew each other for five weeks before marriage. Stevens grew closer to his two children, both adopted, after the 1973 death of his first wife, Bettie Stevens, said his daughter Verna Walker, who'd cared for him for the last eight months. LITTLE ROCK - Leonard 'Skeeter' Stevens, a cheery, determined plumber who treasured his children, died Wednesday from complications of multiple respiratory diseases at his daughter's home in Beebe.

Pester plumbing