Saddled by corn fields stretching into the vast horizon, Mattoon, Illinois, is about 185 miles south of Chicago with a population of just under 17,000. The rural farmland was an idyllic backdrop for a kid like Will Leitch with a big imagination and a penchant for baseball.
Leitch, 50, is the founder of the successful sports blog, Deadspin, the author of seven books, with his latest, “Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride,” in development with Lionsgate film studio, co-host of three podcasts, and a contributing writer at the Washington Post, MLB.com, New York Magazine, The New York Times, and Medium.
Leitch and his wife, Alexa Stevenson – a Columbus, Georgia, native and University of Georgia alumna – and their two sons, William and Wynn, moved from the bustling life of New York City to slower paced Athens in 2013 to create a home where his kids could “have a yard and a dog” and avoid the pressures of preschool applications. His parents, Bryan, 76, and Sally, 74, followed in 2017, “to be near the grandkids.”
Work is the Watchword
The Leitch’s don’t know how not to work. Raised in Mattoon, Bryan says he delivered papers from age 7 to 14, set pins at the bowling alley, and then got old enough to work at a local gas station. Luckily, he had a good draft number but still joined the Air Force.
After he and Sally married, he was stationed at Virginia Beach, Virginia, where they both worked at the local Sears.
Bryan spent his career with a unionized power company while Sally went back to school and became a nurse.
“We had good jobs,” Sally recalls. “We worked overtime, and we padded our retirement funds.” Since moving to Georgia, Bryan has built a two-car garage, continued to do maintenance work for a local property management firm, and is always polishing his fully restored 1967 Camaro and his gleaming black truck. “There’s no part of the Camaro I haven’t touched,” he says.
For years, Sally made all Will’s and sister Jill’s clothes, and today, all the drapes in their Winterville house are her handiwork. When she first moved to Athens, she worked at the UGA health center. Now she runs races on a regular basis and volunteers on the local library board.
“You can’t teach work ethics,” Bryan states. “You have to get it from home.”
There was no generation gap between Sally and Bryan and their parents. They inherited their parents’ work ethic and their contentment with small town living. Mattoon had one grocery store, it was cohesive and conservative with no alcohol, and little impacted by the turmoil of the 1960s and 70s. The town would continue to be a good place to grow up in for Will and his sister in the 1980s and 90s. There was no worry of “stranger danger.”
Hometown Life
Each day Sally greeted the two children as they stepped off the bus from school until she started nursing school when Will was 12. Then, like GenX latchkey kids all over America, they were left to their own devices until their parents got home.
“We were like 13 miles from town,” Will recalls. “Living out in the country.” He spent afternoons walking through the nearby woods and tramping through creeks, a scene he equates to something out of the movie “Stand by Me.”
On the other hand, “There were a lot of chores. That’s one of the things I remember most about my childhood – the number of things I had to get done before Dad got home.”
And then there were outings with his friends, like the time his parents dropped him and his friends off at a Six Flags Amusement Park in St. Louis and picked them up when the park closed.
“There was no checking in with my parents,” he said. “There was no phone to track. They knew I wasn’t leaving the park.” His parents’ trust in him grew with age.
“I think I had a 9 o’clock bedtime until my freshman year of high school. When I turned 16 and got a job at a movie theater, I got home at 1:30 in the morning. There was a trust that I wasn’t coming home drunk.”
Will’s parents didn’t push him to go to college, but when the by-then movie fanatic heard film critic Roger Ebert, a University of Illinois alumnus, speak about working at the student newspaper, the Daily Illini, Will knew he wanted to attend UI.
Ebert is why Will went to the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana less than an hour away from home. Ebert is why he majored in journalism. Ebert is why he became editor of the Daily Illini. Ebert is also why he went to New York City to cut his teeth as a writer.
Sports and Music
The other ties that bind the Leitch men are baseball – the St. Louis Cardinals, to be specific – and music of the Boomer era. Both men played Little League baseball as children, and Bryan often coached Will’s teams. Fond memories for the whole family are the many joint efforts to move their giant satellite dish around to pick up yet another baseball game from across the country.
Sports would be Will’s entrée into the world of books and blogs when he launched Deadspin in 2005, which ultimately became the world’s most visited sports blog with 116 million visitors in less than three years. From there, he began his book publishing career with a goal to write a book, fiction or nonfiction, every two years, he says. In 2010, he published “Are We Winning? Fathers and Sons in the New Golden Age of Baseball.” The book unfolds in half-inning increments as father and son watch a game and drink lots of beer in Wrigley Field. As one reviewer wrote, “baseball holds them together. No matter how far apart they are or what’s going on in their lives, they’ll always be able to talk about baseball.”
And then there’s the shared love of 60s and 70s music. One of his favorite childhood memories he wrote about in his newsletter is riding with his dad in his pickup truck with Bruce Springsteen belting out “Born in the USA” from the well-worn cassette tape in the dashboard, his dad tapping his fingers on the steering wheel to the beat.
Will knows the lyrics to all the Springsteen and Dylan songs, but as a teenager, who listened to Nirvana and Wilco, he thought his parents’ music was “so lame.
“My dad probably thought when he was listening to CCR [Credence Clearwater Revival] in high school that his dad’s Buddy Holly was the lamest stuff in the world. And now he likes it. And now I like my parents’ music. I bet someday Wilco is going to come on the radio, and my kids are going be like, ‘Oh, that’s Dad’s song.’”
“I think it’s okay for you to have a cultural, particularly musical, gap with your kids,” he said. “It’s hard to not think of the music your parents listened to as the soundtrack to your youth.”
Parenting Today
Will and his wife Alexa live with their two sons William, 13, and Wynn, 11, in Athens’ Five Points, where houses are close together and modern conveniences a short walk away. They instill independence in their two boys, who ride their bikes in the neighborhood, and go on errands for their parents to ADD Drug Store.
He keeps a more watchful eye on his kids than his parents did, but he insists that he’s not as much a helicopter parent as his GenX peers. This summer they dropped Wynn at the UGA golf course and picked him up three hours later.
“I think that him having that kind of autonomy of movement and not having us breathing down his neck, I think is good for him,” Will said.
He recently suggested to his son William that he should just drop him and his friends at Six Flags.
“He was like, ‘Wow, that would be kind of cool,’ as opposed to my reaction, which was ‘That’s just what we did all the time.’”
“For a lot of GenX kids, you would always hear the idea that they were latchkey kids. And some felt like we were almost deprived that we came home, and our parents weren’t there. I was not one of those kids.”
Having busy parents has shaped Will’s parenting style.
“My wife and I are very busy people [Alexa is an in-demand interior designer]. We both do a lot. Not only do we not want to be on top of them all the time, but we also wouldn’t have time to do any work. Still, we’re on top of them more than our parents were on top of us.”
Politics was not a topic discussed at the dinner table. There were other things to talk about, like baseball, school, movies, and, well, baseball.
Now he worries about the world his sons are inheriting and speaks passionately about his concerns. He was in New York City when the Twin Towers were struck, and he always thought that 9/11 would be the defining event in his era. But now he feels that the last several years, between politics and the pandemic, are the most difficult.
He thinks about what life must have been like for his parents who lived through the Vietnam War, Nixon resigning, and the Cold War becoming a nuclear war.
“I think about those tumultuous times, and that’s what it feels like now,” he said. “I need this place to be okay for my kids. They’re going to have to fix all the things that we’re breaking.”
On Turning 50
Will had not lived in the same town as his parents since he went to college until Bryan and Sally moved to Athens in 2017. Now that his parents are nearby and involved with his own kids, he reflects on his relationship with his sons, especially as he is turning 50 this year.
“I think about how I moved to New York in January 2000 when my dad was 50. So, it’s hard to wrap my mind around that I’m going to be 50, because everything I did, I did 10 years after my dad. He got married when he was 24. I got married when I was 34. I had my first kid when I was 36. And he had his first when he was 26.”
For now, Will says he’s enjoying every moment with his parents, recalling the “Glory Days,” and making new memories with his boys.
“Dad is still the guy we call when we need something fixed, Mom is still the one we call when someone’s got something wrong with their arm,” he said. “They’re a part of my life. We’re going out to dinner tonight, and it’s not a special occasion. And that is something that I am grateful for. We always had a good relationship, but now, I mean, we’re friends.”
Tracy N. Coley worked for nearly 30 years in communications at the University of Georgia where she earned an MFA in narrative nonfiction writing. She is owner of Lucky Dog Press, a local boutique book publishing firm offering writers individualized guidance. She also teaches classes on writing craft and writing through grief and trauma.
Betsy Bean is the founder and publisher of Boom Athens Magazine.
