Lloyd E. Lenard - Family, Education, Military

Family, Education, Military

Lenard was born to James Lenard (1890–1966) and Doshie Lenard (1888–1971) in West Monroe in Ouachita Parish. The second youngest of seven children, he outlived all of his siblings. James Lenard deserted the family during the Great Depression. Lloyd Lenard’s difficult upbringing is highlighted in his 2005 book Papa Left Us But Mama Pulled Us Through. Of his mother, Lenard said: "This tiny woman had only Christian love and pioneer courage with which to hold her family together after her handsome, womanizing husband left her on a tenant farm with seven children and no resources." Lenard further recalled how his mother taught him and his brothers and sisters to "take care of ourselves and stand on our own two feet. did just that, and in her declining years, the children took care of her and, strangely enough, of their handsome father who had no others to whom to turn as he became ill and started his long slide into death."

Lenard graduated from Ouachita Parish High School in Monroe and attended the University of Louisiana at Monroe, then "Northeast Junior College". He completed his bachelor’s degree in journalism on a scholarship at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He obtained his master’s degree in advertising and merchandising at the University of Missouri in Columbia, a premier school in the field.

In Missouri, he met his future wife, the former Betty-Jo Sawyer (born September 24, 1928) of Framingham, Massachusetts, whom he nicknamed “Sky”. She was attending Stephens College, a women’s liberal arts institution also in Columbia. The couple met at the First Baptist Church of Columbia. They married in Massachusetts on December 23, 1947, at the time of what was determined to have been the worst blizzard in the state in a half-century.

During World War II, Lenard was chosen for the Navy's officer training school at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana. He was a lieutenant with the amphibious forces in the Mediterranean Theatre.