Leonard Skinner, the high school gym teacher who inspired the band name Lynyrd Skynyrd, has died at age 77 in a Riverside, Florida nursing home.
Skinner, born Forby Leonard Skinner, never intended to become a piece of rock-and-roll history. He was simply enforcing a dress code at Robert E. Lee High School in the late 1960s when he fatefully sent a few teenagers to the principal's office for violating new rules about hair length. "The hair had to be two fingers above the eyebrows, couldn't touch the collar," Skinner explained in an interview several years ago. "One of the ones I sent down was in this band ... called the One Percent," he recalled, referring to the band that would later become Lynyrd Skynyrd.
The student, threatened with suspension, brought his father in to school to argue that the band was helping contribute to his household income -- and that long hair was a requirement for that quintessential rock-and-roll look. The principal, unmoved, had a solution: a haircut and a wig. The young musician (the band hasn't identified which one of them it was, but Skinner counted guitarist Gary Rossington and singer Ronnie Van Zant among his pupils) wound up tucking his hair up in a hairnet. The band renamed itself after Skinner in 1970 and swapped out the vowels for the letter Y before the release of their 1973 debut "Lynyrd Skynyrd." Despite its creative spelling, the band's name is phonetically pronounced "Leonard Skinnerd" (though most often mispronounced "Lih-nerd Skinerd").
Skinner was unaware of his connection to the southern rock heroes until he heard a radio DJ say, " 'Here's a song by Lynyrd Skynyrd.' That's the first time I had an idea something might be happening," he later recalled in an interview with Van Zant's former bodyguard, Gene Odom.
