EP#37 Concussions Kill, CTE the new silent killer. A story of Lamar Robert Leachman, CFL NFL Champion and Coach told by Lori Leachman

Lori Leachman is a professor of economics at Duke University. She has been teaching economics at the university level for over thirty-five years. She earned her Ph.D. in economics in 1987, from the University of South Carolina. Before turning to literature, Dr. Leachman wrote for and published in a variety of academic journals. She has been in Who's Who of America's Teachers, won the 1995 Student Award for Teaching Excellence at Northern Arizona University's College of Business, and won the Howard D. Johnson Distinguished Teaching Award in 2002/3 at Duke University. In 1994 she was a summer fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California.

Dr. Leachman never had an aspiration to write creatively. However, in 2012 when her father died, she knew she had a story that deserved to be told. She shared that story with a number of writer friends, trying to pique their interest. They all told her that it was her story, and she needed to be the one to write it. Over the course of the next few years, Ms. Leachman let the story gestate. In 2015, while on vacation in France, she began writing vignettes. Within a few months she had the outline of the story. Over the next two years the story presented here emerged.

At the age of fifty, Dr. Leachman realized that her life was passing and there were a number of things outside of academics that she wanted to pursue. She took a semester off, and enrolled in a painting course at a local university. That course started her on her second path of professional development, as an artist. Since that time she has exhibited and sold her work in a number of galleries and public venues in the Durham area.

Lori Leachman lives and teaches in Durham, N.C. for half of the year. The other half of the year she lives in Sedona, Az. where she writes and paints, and is close to her two grown sons on the West Coast.