LEON: A LIFE
The true stories of Captain Leon H. Schneider, as told to his son, Ivan Schneider. A collaborative memoir of a man who came of age poor in New York during the Great Depression, hitchhiked across the country as a teenager, and joined the Merchant Marine. Leon was torpedoed twice in the Second World War and spent more than two decades as a ship’s officer before he settled down and started a family.
How a life became a book
Leon was forty-eight when his son Ivan was born. When Ivan reached that same age, he set out to understand his father’s life — a long series of phone calls across the country that turned a bundle of stories into a life. The book came together in roughly four months, from first story to finished publication. Real Simple wrote about the process in February 2021, in a feature on the power of a parent’s life stories.
“It was a bunch of stories before, but it became a life story.”— Ivan Schneider, in Real Simple, February 2021
Caribbean Sinkings
In LIFE magazine, August 24, 1942, a twenty-year-old merchant seaman gave a first-person account of being torpedoed twice in the Caribbean, a day apart: the scramble to abandon ship, a night in a lifeboat after the first sinking, rescue by another freighter, and then, sleeping on deck under a moon and bright silver stars, that ship torpedoed out from under him too. That seaman was Leon Schneider.