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Is Leggett Just Too Likable?
Leggett talks with Bob Resnik and Lou Schap during a neighborhood campaign get-together in Bethesda.
(By Robert A. Reeder -- The Washington Post)
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Leggett is aware of the criticism. In campaign literature, he's combating it with a slogan: "Decisive leadership for Montgomery County." And he makes light of it at campaign events.
At a recent event in Silver Spring, Leggett brought up seemingly contrasting roles he played in college: He was at once the brigade commander of the ROTC and an antiwar demonstrator who was once arrested. At times, he said, he remembered thinking, "I'm really demonstrating against myself."
Growing Up in the Old South
Leggett was born into poverty in Alexandria, La., the seventh of 12 children (a 13th died shortly after being born) who grew up in a three-room shotgun house.
"Not three bedrooms," he said. "Three rooms , period."
For a time, the house at 3161 Wise St. didn't have running water or electricity, Leggett said. And although his parents both worked -- his mother was a short-order cook, and his father rebuilt fences and did odd jobs -- neighbors sometimes brought over dinner because food was scarce.
He went to segregated schools that used hand-me-down textbooks from the white schools and that didn't provide transportation to its students.
"If you didn't know my background, you would think I always lived in a house like this," he said, sitting in the living room of his 4,564-square-foot Burtonsville home, which sits on five acres and has a tennis court in back.
"I do understand what it's like not to have health insurance, or not to have adequate housing," he said.
But he did have people looking out for him. Siblings, many of whom have gone on to careers in the military, education and health. Neighbors. Teachers. Coaches. And a principal at Peabody High School who pushed his students.
"We were not taught to hate as a result of what you don't have," said Jewel Limar Prestage, one of Leggett's political science professors at Southern University, who also is from Alexandria. "We were taught to appreciate yourself as child of God."
Which is what Mary Leggett had been telling her children all along.
One day when Ike Leggett was about 11, he was picking up balls on the driving range where he worked, and a golfer told him to back up a bit and then stand still.
