This is a follow-up story to my Lee Bean post on July 29th. After reading it, my sister Barbara got busy on Google and found an online story titled “How to Grow a Mountain Man” written by Meredith Bean McMath.

Meredith, an accomplished author and playwright, had a grandfather from West Virginia whose name was Lorenzo Lee Bean. Yep, L.L. Bean.

When L.L. Bean got married, he and his wife Adelaide moved to Fort Meade, Florida and had three children. Their third, Lorenzo Lee Bean, Jr. was born in 1916. In 1924, the family moved to Lakeland, FL. After the depression hit, the family went back to Virginia.

L.L. Bean, Jr. was known as “Lee.” He entered college in 1933 and joined the football team.

Then the summer after his freshman year, Lee contracted polio. After two years of excruciating exercise, his arm muscle returned and Lee learned to walk with crutches and metal braces. During this period he kept up with his schoolwork and miraculously graduated with his class in 1937.

Next Lee entered law school at the University of Virginia and wound up tutoring none other than the son of President Roosevelt! Not an easy task so when FDR, Jr. graduated, his grateful Dad–the President–thanked Lee in person.

Lee took a job in Washington, D.C. as a lawyer with the Department of Agriculture. He lived at the Slaughter Guest House and became friends with Hedvig Johnson.  They often walked to work together. I’m sure Lee told Hedy about his growing up in Fort Meade and Lakeland.

Little did Hedy know that in just five years she would be married to Herman Allen and live only a few miles from there, in Bartow.

Lee married a beautiful young woman named Maxine. He went on to become a successful and honorable Arlington lawyer. He even did a little side job for the CIA.

And for the rest of her years, Hedy talked about Lee Bean to her children and her grandchildren. That’s what kind of an impression this young man made on her. Because of his name (L.L. Bean, Jr.) she and all of us assumed that Lee was the son of the clothier from Maine, that other L.L.

As my brother Bill wrote after he heard the story and read about the “real” Lee Bean:

“His story is most fascinating. He sounds like a wonderful person of real integrity. I’m more impressed with this person because of who he really is than some connection to the LL Bean family of Maine.”

When Lee’s daughter Meredith and I emailed back and forth, she knew exactly who I was.  Although her Dad passed away in 1989, her mother Maxine remembers Lee talking a lot about Hedy Johnson… and that he was very fond of her.

The feeling was mutual.

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