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I went to South Miami purposely as a stepping stone out of Florida. I am a small town boy from upstate New York, and although in one sense the climate in Miami was inviting, in others it was not. In the early ’80s the area was rife with crime — a situation that was greatly exacerbated with the influx of the Marielistos from Cuba and the Cocaine Cowboys from Colombia. I was trying to raise two young sons in an area where gunmen opened up with machine guns at 2 in the afternoon at a liquor store in one of the city’s most opulent shopping centers. The whole scene didn’t set well with me.

My early efforts to get out were frustrated by my job title. "Director, Central Processing and Distribution" just didn’t have the oomph to land me a Director of Materials job outside of Miami, so when I got the opportunity to go to South Miami Hospital as Director of Materials, I jumped at it. Interestingly enough, the job content at South Miami was exactly the same as it had been at Baptist. At neither place was I responsible for purchasing and contracting. But at South Miami, I had the title, and much like the Scarecrow in the "Wizard of Oz" (who lacked a diploma to document the fact that he had a brain), once the title was present, the job opportunities fairly jumped at me.

I finally decided to move my family north to Canton, OH — home of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Timken Mercy Medical Center and Leonard Puduls — retiring Director of Materials Management.

Timken Mercy was a 565-bed hospital that was owned by the Sisters of Charity of St. Augustine. The Sisters owned and managed five hospitals through a loosely-knit network. I accepted the position of Associate Director, Materials Management, in November 1983. It was an interesting situation. The current director had announced his retirement effective in July 1984 and he wanted to select and train his replacement.

I met Leonard Puduls, the Director, during the interview process. He was 67 years old and a dead ringer for Vincent Gardenia, the character actor who would eventually play the role of Cher’s father in Moonstruck. During the interview process, the first question he asked me was, "How much you pay for TB syringes at your hospital?" I told him I had no idea.

He didn’t seem impressed.

Leonard was a curmudgeon. He cultivated a reputation for being a first-class hard ass when it came to negotiating with vendors — especially female vendors. He called them "peddlers." One rep in particular was so easily done in by Leonard’s tactics that he always instructed her to "get the Kleenex" before she went into his office to speak with him.

Leonard had been born and raised in Riga, Latvia. He had been there when the Russians overran the country in 1940 and placed troops on Latvian soil. He was there when the Nazis supplanted the Soviets (he said the Nazis were more congenial to the Latvians than the Soviets). He left when the Soviets came back.

After the war Leonard migrated to America — landing in Anderson, SC, where he began his work in healthcare. He brought with him his wife and son, Juris. In the early 1950s, Leonard moved his family to Canton, where his wife’s niece (Nelly) and her husband (Karlis) worked for Mercy Hospital that eventually became known as the Timken Mercy Medical Center. That is where Leonard ruled the supply chain with an iron fist and a ready, handcrafted manual spreadsheet. You name it and there was a spreadsheet for it — all this in the day when spreadsheets were manufactured on special graph paper with hours of manual input. There was nothing Leonard Puduls could not prove with his ruler, paper and pencil. He was getting better prices than anyone — including the Cleveland Clinic. He was turning his inventory precisely 26 times per year. His monthly adjustments were miniscule if not non-existent. He made certain that Cheryl, the woman responsible for inventory, kept things that way. The first year I was there, the total inventory adjustment at year-end was $62. Leonard said it was a bad year.

Leonard was ferocious like a lion, but also soft and caring. His family had been beset with more than its share of tragedy. His son, Juris, was an Army medic who was killed in action in Vietnam in July 1966 — a month before I arrived there as a medic (corpsman) with the Marines. He adopted a pair of twin girls. Years later, one of the daughters and her child were killed in a house fire. Leonard kept these hurts inside.

Leonard treated me like a son. He told me not to worry about taking time off at Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s my first year (when I had not accrued any PTO time). He said he would take care of it — and he did. He taught me what I needed to know about the hospital and the system (CSA). For him, CSA meant open warfare; he believed that the system was out to get us and that we always had to stay ahead of the game. Ultimately, he would prove to be right — but not in 1983-84.

And he taught me how to drink clear, unadulterated vodka in large amounts. Leonard was famous for his Christmas parties — first at the old Mercy Hospital downtown and finally at the new site. We would start drinking around Noon, and the drinking would continue until whenever it ended. If I hadn’t had the foresight to keep pouring mine into the drinking fountain outside the office, I would probably have gone blind.

In the eight months we worked together, there were two magnificent parties — the Christmas party I mentioned already, and Leonard’s going away party in July. That party would have resulted in the instant termination of at least two dozen senior managers if it were held today.

Leonard Puduls was a fine man. Whenever those of us who are born in this country forget how fortunate we are and begin complaining, we should think of folks like Leonard Puduls, who came here to escape persecution and who, against tremendous odds, persevered and succeeded grandly.

Leonard had another aspect of his personality that bears reporting. He took care of all the local Latvian immigrants— especially the widows. He would help them after their husbands had died and shepherd them through life. He always knew when one of them was about to die. He would have a dream that he was "building walls."

I didn’t have such a dream when Leonard died. In fact, I was long since removed from Northeast Ohio. But I remember Leonard Puduls regularly and I thank my lucky Latvian stars for having had the pleasure to have known him.