By Ken Mammarella
Contributing Writer

Steven Leech became a multimedia creator decades before the concept became common. 

In 1959, he wrote his first story. “I was curious about a lot of things,” he explained in an interview, adding that writing has also helped him “get rid of stuff” and “exorcise demons.” 

In 1984, he produced 13 radio programs that constituted the first broadcast edition of Dreamstreets, a magazine that had begun in 1977 to showcase local progressive artists, photographers and writers.

In 1989, he started a radio show. “Even Steven’s Boptime’ mixes music of the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s: bebop, hotbop, cool school, R&B, pop, rock ’n’ roll, according to WVUD, which has also installed him in its Hall of Fame.

The radio show is still a fixture 6-10 a.m. Saturdays on the University of Delaware station, with some programs produced since 2010 with Larry Williams. The programs go beyond music, Leech said, to include deeper messages on social issues and radio dramas.

Dreamstreets – which has also sponsored monthly poetry readings, had a video element and created more radio programs – published its 83rd issue this summer. Leech is the executive editor.

But after 600 articles and 10 books, he’s stopped writing. “I’ve written everything I have to say.”

A personal portrait 

Leech is an 82-year-old whose family goes back generations in Delaware, including the great-grandfather who lent his name to Leech Avenue in Elsmere. He entered the working world as a paperboy, soda jerk and retail clerk. After graduating from Conrad High School (now Conrad Schools of Science), he started studying philosophy at Wesley College (now part of Delaware State University). He was trying to transfer to the University of Delaware when he was drafted by the Army in 1966.

He returned from his tour of duty in Vietnam in 1968, the week that martial law was declared in Wilmington, following riots sparked by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. “I came from one war zone to another,” he recalled. “That was a big turning point.”

He shed his right-wing beliefs to protest the war and injustice, and he also connected with people trying to combat what he called the state’s “cultural wasteland.” Part of that involved editing a UD publication called Viewpoint that wrote about black history and “radical feminists who hadn’t talked to a man in years.” He graduated from UD in 1974, with a major in English and minor in history.

Over his decades of work, he’s only had one job with benefits, driving a school bus in the Newark area from 1973 to 1998. “And I hate to drive,” he said. Since 2003, he’s worked on and off as a UD Library stacker, returning borrowed books and keeping the stacks organized.

Here’s how he describes himself to readers: “Steven Leech currently lives in a cramped apartment in a modest and aging apartment complex within the suburban sprawl between Wilmington and Newark, Delaware. It is here that he not only staves off poverty but enjoys the infrequent company of a few good friends, constantly processing to manage the psychic pain from lifelong PTSD, conjures new contributions to the local cultural environment, strives to gain a better understanding of the world and cosmos around him, and communes with the ineffably divine spirit dreaming in every sentient being.”

Informed by the past

“Steve Leech is a treasure trove of knowledge on both the literary and musical fronts,” said Williams, a musician, saxophonist, composer, arranger, music historian, record collector, part of a jazz ensemble called Keepers of the Flame and board member of the Delaware Rock & Roll Society.

Williams has joined Leech for more than 200 programs called “Clifford’s Corner,” in honor of Wilmington jazz legend Clifford Brown. “Our first hour is devoted to jazz, the second to R&B. … We talk about the music we play and try to educate our listeners as well as playing songs that they may have never heard, or haven’t heard in a long time,” he said. 

“I learned quite a bit about the history of jazz in Wilmington from him. Besides that, he’s a great friend, and we work well together. A number of records that I have in my collection today are things I first heard on ‘Boptime.’ … Being on the radio with Even Steven is a blast.”

Leech’s written works, his selections for “Boptime” and content in Dreamstreets often involve Delaware’s literary past. “I have a thing about literary history,” he said. “There are a lot of us who are writing today who don’t realize, don’t want to be or don’t even think about being part of a historical legacy.” And he knows that legacy well, drawing upon his large personal library, his work in cataloguing and archiving for UD and the Delaware Historical Society and other research. 

His fiction includes “Poe’s Daughter, Pym’s Soul: A Gothic Tale of the Antebellum Mid-Atlantic” and “The Secret Life of Tux Munce,” which he calls “a speculative history of northern Delaware” featuring real people like novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, who lived in the state from 1927 to 1929.

Leech’s nonfiction includes “Boysie’s Horn: The History of Jazz in Wilmington in the 20th Century” and “Valdemar’s Corpse: Exploring the History of Delaware’s Literary Art.” “In ‘Valdemar’s Corpse,’ the story of Delaware’s literary legacy is allowed here to speak, however briefly, from its academically imposed deathbed before returning to cultural amnesia,” he wrote early in the book.

Connections

Dreamstreets today exists almost entirely online (www.dreamstreetsarchive.com), with on-demand hard copies available on www.blurb.com, the same website that Leech uses for his own books.

Leech likes each issue to feature “something historical, some good poetry, some fiction, some interesting art.” Producing it is a labor of love. “No pay, no budget,” he said. “Everything is sweat equity.” Working with him are Phillip Bannowsky, Douglas Morea and Franetta McMillian. The first three are all in their 80s, with McMillian two decades younger.

“I have often joked two-thirds seriously that Steven Leech, author, editor, radio host, and retired school bus driver, is Delaware’s pre-eminent man of letters,” Bannowsky wrote in 2011, when he was recommending him for a Guggenheim award. “Frugally and at great personal sacrifice, Leech has breathed new life into the rich legacy of popular and literary culture in a small state laboring against enormous institutional inertia.”

Bannowsky, who has known Leech since 1968 and was Leech’s editor for “Boysie’s Horn,” said that “Leech’s style and content are of a character outside the mainstream and the well connected. His personal literary work is ... at times deeply, painfully personal and at times adventurous and prophetic.”

Thanks to modern technology, Leech can produce content for his radio show and Dreamstreets from his home, where he feels safe. “I don’t want to be hurt, and I don’t want to hurt others,” he said about his preference to stay at home. “I’m a recluse.”