Leon Beaumon

Leon Beaumon also credited as Leon Beauman Beaumont and Leon Duval was a minor stage and film actor during the 1920s and 1930s He wasborn Herman Bauman in 1898 on a farm near Youngstown Ohio to German immigrant parents He worked in steel mills as a youth and studied with his two brothers near Chicago to be a Catholic priest However in 1920 Herman had an argument with one of his superiors in the seminary and set out for California to become a movie star persuading his younger brother Marty to join him In their migration West during Prohibition they worked in a still and ran hooch in Denver Once in Hollywood they changed their last name to Beaumon and Herman became Leon Leon and Marty lived in a boarding house in Hollywood along with Clark Gable and John Wayne before the latter two found fame and fortune They were all poor enough and close enough in size that the four men owned one suit of clothes among them and scheduled their auditions around one another to wear the suit Leons filmography is largely a mystey due to the passage of time and his legendary attempts to hide his true age thus he gave few details of his Hollywood career to his children From a scrapbook archival sources and his lifelong friend and fellow actor the late Bob St Angelo it is known so far that he had credited roles in A Fight to the Finish 1925 Clancy of the Mounted 1933 Pioneer Trail 1938 and The Law Comes to Texas 1939 He had uncredited roles in Cleopatra 1934 Folies Bergère de Paris 1935 Fugitive at Large 1939 Les Misérables 1935 The Call of the Wild 1935 The Freshman 1925 The Mighty Barnum 1934 The Sea Wolf 1930 The Wizard of Oz 1939 The Vagabond King 1930 and Western Frontier 1935 He often played the bad guy in Ken Maynards westerns During his acting days Leon ran an ice cream shop in Hollywood He was also an inventor creating one of the first wireless radios the record changer on record players and numerous other gadgets During World War 2 Leon joined the Army Air Corps and remained stateside Subsequently he became a real estate broker and eventually an industrial landlord Leon remained single until 1961 when he married Theresa Hermine Gruber They made their home in a Los Angeles suburb and had three children Florence Anthony and Monique Leon never retired even putting a roof on a building when he was in his 70s His beloved wife preceded him in death in 1978 Leon passed away from cancer in 1981 at the age of 83 His nephew and his nephews wife Jim and Marj Smerber generously took care of him in his illness and finished rearing his minor children