Lenny Brown

LENNY BROWN was a real Renaissance Man. In a town of less than 500, that was a feat in itself, but he was the sensitive artistic type that is always associated with being a Renaissance Man. He was a philosopher whenever he could get a person to listen. He was a painter—you know the type that paints portraits or landscapes on old eyeglass lenses and sells them at the county fair or local craft show. Most of all, he fancied himself an inventor.

In most things, you wouldn’t call him pretentious, but he did have the ego to blush whenever anyone called him Leonardo da Brown, which he insists he never started but accepted as a plaudit from his friends and neighbors. There was some resemblance after he grew a beard, but he never did learn Italian—or Latin for that matter.

Lenny once invented a chicken plucking machine for the farm, but it proved more difficult to operate than just dunking the headless birds in scalding water and pulling the feathers out by hand. And when it came down to it, chicken-farming was the bread and butter on the table, so Lenny didn’t let any of his own inventions interfere with the profitability of the old ranch.