Growing up in Compton in the 1960s, Deborah Swan always looked forward to visits from her grandfather, Leon Hefflin Sr. A handsome, dapper man who wore a suit and a hat, Hefflin was a perpetual tinkerer. He had built her brother s bunk bed and created an aromatic tincture, Leon s Foot Ointment. He smoked a pipe and was very quiet. He never bragged about himself, Swan recalls. If he had been inclined to do so, he would ve had plenty to say.
Hefflin was a dreamer, a serial entrepreneur, a breaker of color barriers and the producer of the Cavalcade of Jazz, a trailblazing annual music festival that