"Bert" Leddy was born in 1883 in Hutchins Mills, Vermont, now a deserted logging camp near Stevensville, where his grandfather settled a farm after immigrating from Ireland with his family during the Great Hunger of 1847.
Bert was listed as a farm worker at sixteen, and may have worked as a carpenter with his father, or in the lumber industry. With no formal education, he moved to Burlington, and found work in the creameries. In 1923, he co-owned an ice cream parlor on Church St. called LEDRICK'S. He eventually retired from Strong Hardware. He wrote many humorous poems about the people he worked with there. He married Nellie Collins in 1917. Their only-child Mary was born in 1919. They lived on St. Paul St., not far from their daughter and her husband Leo Abair, and their nine children.
The family knew Bert was creative. His house was full of his innovations: conveyer-belted candy-making machine, electric lawn mowers, motorized ice-sleigh (supposedly built for bootlegger); weighted cables adjusted TV antenna; spring-loaded strips sealed exterior door. They knew he wrote poetry, and remember him reciting the Robert Service poem The Cremation of Sam McGee. But he was not known to have published anything.
When Bert died in 1967, he left behind two old typewritten manuscripts of his poetry. Although, he was known for writing and reciting poetry for family and friends, the evolution of most of the poems in the manuscripts could not be explained. They had titles like Lost in the Desert, Arctic Love, Vengeance on the Sea, The Tale of the Toreador. He had never traveled far from Vermont!
It wasn't until his grandson, Chris Abair, set out to transcribe the manuscripts in 1990, was the significants of the poetry realized.