Flying was Snohomish man’s way to work, serve and play

Lee Leavitt’s family has an old newspaper photograph of a boy kneeling next to a homemade airplane.

“As a child back in Maine, he started building airplanes,” said Leavitt’s daughter, Mary McCall. “He was 6 or 7 and building these balsa wood airplanes. In the picture in the paper, he was about 14.

“For him, I think it was something he was born with,” McCall said. “It was his passion. He just loved flying.”

Leland Leavitt died Jan. 14 in Snohomish, where he made his home. He was 71. Leavitt is survived by his wife, Fran; his sister, Nancy, of Waterville, Maine; a son, Tim, of Kirkland; a daughter, McCall, of Monroe; and three grandchildren, Chris, Kaden and Kaci.

Lee Leavitt, a pilot and lifetime member of Seattle Sky Divers, wears his jumping gear in 1967.

Leavitt made flight his work, his play and his way of serving others.

As a young man, he was employed by the Boeing Co. on the Minuteman missile project. He went on to co-own Skymotive Inc., an aircraft maintenance and repair business at Harvey Field near Snohomish.

“He wasn’t a corporate kind of guy; he liked working for himself,” McCall said.

A lifetime member of the Seattle Sky Divers, he jumped competitively and was a member of the U.S. team at the 1963 Sky Diving Nationals in Issaquah.

As a helicopter pilot, he worked on contract with the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office’s search and rescue team from 1974 to 2002.

“He was an exceptional man. You could count on him all the time,” said Tom Barr, Leavitt’s business partner for 42 years at Skymotive and a fellow search and rescue pilot. “He was one heck of a good partner, one of the best around.”

Tim Leavitt remembers that as a kid he listened to a scanner as his father piloted rescue flights.

“It was always a big part of our summers. We didn’t take typical family vacations. He needed to be around, and he always carried a pager,” Tim Leavitt said.

“When Dad would go out, we’d hear him on the scanner out flying and listen to know when he was coming home. We’d hear his call signs at Skymotive and know he had landed.”

Barr recalled many helicopter search missions with his partner near Index, Darrington and Mount Dickerman.

“We were commissioned by the sheriff’s office. We had the helicopters on the field,” Barr said.

Leavitt and Barr were working at the Harvey Field business years ago when owner Hank Strauch told them they could either buy it or “go find other jobs,” Barr said.

“We thought we’d buy the business and run it a couple of years. It turned into 42 years.”

Barr, also 71, is closing Skymotive and retiring.

Lee Leavitt was born July 7, 1934, in Oakland, Maine, the son of Loretta and Lawrence Leavitt. He earned his airframe and power plant certification at East Coast Aero Tech in Bedford, Mass.

Fran Leavitt, who also worked at Boeing, said she met her husband while skiing at Stevens Pass. “He had come out here on vacation, and as a lark applied at Boeing,” she said.

She said her husband got into sky diving after he and Barr started ferrying other sky divers.

Tim Leavitt said one reason his father tried sky diving was that as a flier dropping sky divers, he thought, “You can’t appreciate it unless you do it yourself.”

Once he tried it, “he really got into competitive sky diving. He just loved all aspects of air sports,” Tim said.

An expert mechanic, he had also received the Federal Aviation Administration’s Charles Taylor Master Mechanic Award. “It was something he loved and was very, very good at,” Fran Leavitt said.

Leavitt used those skills as a mechanic to restore vintage Ford Mustangs for both his children.

“Mine is a 1967, my brother’s is a ‘68,” McCall said. “He didn’t buy them working. Mine was out in a potato field and had been there three or four years. He bought it for, I think, $300. It had field mice in it.”

McCall and her brother still have those cars. She drives hers when the weather is good.

Fran Leavitt, who jumped from an airplane only once, said her husband gave up the sport as his family grew.

“He was good about that. The children came first,” she said. “He had a full life, and he was doing what he loved to do.”

Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@ heraldnet.com.

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