By Mike London
Salisbury Post
DENVER— Services to celebrate the life of Leonard Christopher Campagna were held on Saturday, March 7.
A 1962 Catawba College graduate, Campagna, who was known as Lenny, was the first boys basketball coach at Gastonia’s Hunter Huss High in the winter of 1962-63, when the school had just opened and still didn’t have its own basketball gym or football field. Campagna also taught biology and driver’s education and was an assistant football coach.
On the same day that Campagna’s life was memorialized, the Hurnter Huss boys basketball team won its regional championship game with J.M. Robinson and will be making its first state championship game appearance in 15 years.
Campagna grew up in a very large Pennsylvania family. He was a first-generation American whose parents had come to the USA from Italy. After high school, he served in the Marine Corps.
Campagna attended the State Teachers College in Lock Haven in Pennsylvania as a college freshman. He came to Catawba in the fall of 1959 to play football. He was part of the Indians’ football squad as a sophomore and junior, although he didn’t play as a senior.
Campagna’s basketball efforts at Catawba were limited to intramurals — those were days when the Indians had Al Johnson and Bucky Pope, among others — but he was a popular, outgoing sort who was voted “Class Favorite” as a Junior and served in the Student Government Association. He graduated in 1962.
Campagna met a Salisbury girl at Catawba, Linda Lesslie. She had graduated from Boyden High. Lesslie’s father was John “Professor Cheerwine” Lesslie, an Erskine College graduate who had come to Salisbury while still in his early 20s to take on the job of chemist for the city and for the Carolina Beverage Corporation. He later became the superintendent of Salisbury’s water and sewage treatment plants. John Lesslie died young — at 45 — but not before he became a part of the legend of that ultimate Salisbury product — Cheerwine.
Lenny Campagna and Linda Lesslie’s first date was a basketball game. They eloped about six months later. They had a good life. She could really play the piano and organ and he could really sing. They were the life of parties for decades and traveled the world together. They were married for 62 years until her death at age 80 in 2024.
Campagna coached and taught at South Meck after his stint at Hunter Huss, but his personality made him a natural for sales and he switched to that more lucrative world after a few years of teaching and coaching.
Campagna played tennis until he had a heart attack on the court. Then he switched to golf, a sport he and wife played for years together from the mountains to the coast.
Lenny’s older brother, Wilbert, known as “Will,” was a Catawba football standout who graduated in 1958, met his future wife at Catawba, and went on to a legendary high school coaching career. He coached Charlotte Catholic for 10 seasons and after a few brief stops that included A.L. Brown, he coached North Meck football for 18 seasons. He died in 2011.
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