The Tom & Ethel Bradley Center received a grant from the (NEH) to digitize some of the approximately 22,000 images in its Farmworker Movement Collection.
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