Hardison, former boxer, prison official, dies at 58

Jeffrey Libby

Friday, Dec. 14, 2001 | 10:21 a.m.

Leon Hardison, who traveled from a pair of trailer homes near the railroad to spar as a teenager with the likes of future U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, and in later life worked as the "policeman of the corner" in world title boxing fights, died Monday of an aneurism. He was 58.

A passionate intellectual, career state prison systems administrator, state boxing inspector and an amateur boxer who could be knocked down but return to his feet to land the final blow, Hardison, an African-American, grew up in the racially-charged, tightly segregated Las Vegas of the 1940s and 1950s. It was a time when blacks could take casino jobs as janitors and porters, but risked taunts and fights with whites if during their leisure time they ventured outside of the"West Side," known today as west Las Vegas.

But from his time sparring with former Gov. Mike O'Callaghan, who at the time was a high school teacher and the boxing coach at the Henderson Boys Club, Hardison set his sights on education as a way out of a life on the streets running from the law like many of his friends did, said Erlton "Larry" Lawrence, a life-long friend.

When Hardison and Lawrence enrolled in the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in 1965, known then as Southern Nevada, they were two of the first black students at the one-building school.

"Most blacks thought working in the casino industry was our destiny. But me and Leon figured we ought to be able to go anywhere we damn pleased," Lawrence said. "Most everything we did was adventurous. And when Leon got in the ring, it was a way to be equal to everyone."

Esther Langston, the chairwoman of the School of Social Work at UNLV and a girlfriend of Hardison's through much of the late 1970s -- his first years as a state parole officer -- remembered another side of Hardison.

"He could talk about history and places you didn't know existed. He could always challenge you to discuss things and think about them," Langston said. "You could tell him a date and he could tell you what occurred then."

But if you asked him why he was the first black to buy a home outside of the "West Side," Langston said he'd probably have replied only that he could afford it and that it was a good neighborhood to raise his children.

Hardison, born in Arkansas, came to Las Vegas at a young age, one of about a dozen children who grew up in two trailers. He grew up without the luxury of swamp coolers and outside, in a neighborhood of gravel roads, laundry hung out to dry above chickens and ducks.

His father, who died before Hardison turned 13, worked on the railroad 100 miles north in Caliente.

"He survived. He came through," said Lovell Gaines, a friend and a state prison warden who worked for Hardison. "He could have gave up in life, said the world is against me. But he chose the American way."

By all accounts, it was Hardison's time boxing above the dingy lanes of a former bowling alley in downtown Henderson, one of about 14 amateur boxers under O'Callaghan, that gave him the courage to arm himself with an education and carve out his own path.

While earning a bachelor's degree in history, Hardison went to work for Clark County Juvenile Court Services. Lawrence soon joined him at his bidding, leaving a job at the Nevada Test Site. The two of them spent much of their time counseling "hippies" brought by the busload from parks, still hallucinating or high on marijuana.

Hardison married and had two children. He later divorced, but provided a home in West Las Vegas for his ex-wife until a year before his death when she entered a group home.

Hardison left the county to work for the state as a parole officer, eventually rising to associate warden, and then to warden of the prison in Jean. In all, he worked more than 30 years in the state prison system.

He earned a job as a fight inspector for the state Athletic Commission in 1987, monitoring fighters from the taping of the fighters' hands in the dressing room to drug tests after the fight. With pay of $75 per fight, it was a job Hardison did for the love of the sport, Marc Ratner, executive director of the athletic commission said.

Hardison also taught as a substitute teacher at the Opportunity School, a Las Vegas school for at-risk kids.

In his free time, he fished off his boat for Lake Mead "crappie" and catfish and he tended to a garden that he often bragged about among friends, especially the "great big grape bush." He also traveled frequently, sometimes alone, and brought back art and new histories from such places as Ghana, Kenya and the Caribbean.

He often told those stories at Rev. Westley's D Street barbershop in North Las Vegas, where he would run into Gaines and Joe Wallace, another prison warden.

Just as often, the three men talked of their work experiences in the prisons, Wallace said. To a degree, Wallace said, their relatively comfortable pensions have raised a fence between them and some of the younger generation in west Las Vegas.

Many of the young men they counseled later returned home to west Las Vegas, picked up old habits and turned up dead, he said.

Hardison returned home, too, but as a fighter who beat the odds, and then did his best to show others the way out, too.

O'Callaghan remembered Hardison as "a skinny kid who blossomed into an outstanding athlete, student and public servant."

Reid said, "For the past five decades, Leon was a role model for the rich and poor alike. He was a fighter doing right by others, inside and outside the boxing ring."

Funeral services at Palm Mortuary are pending.