Yesterday I transplanted daffodils, and that made me think about Leo Lawrence.

This is not the right time to transplant daffodils, but I was in excavation mode and it was move them or lose them.

Leo would have scolded me for not delaying my project until the tops died and the bulbs went dormant. On the other hand, in past when I have waited for the tops to die, I couldn’t remember which daffodils were which. We have so many different varieties.

“Where would you like me to put them?” I asked my wife about those I dug up.

“How about in the tree line you cleared last year down the driveway?” Honey said. “But not in a pattern. Here and there.”

“You mean, ‘naturalized,’ like Leo Lawrence said.”

I met Leo Lawrence when I was a reporter and photographer for The (East Liverpool) Review newspaper in the early 1980s. Leo was a man of small stature but large in ways that count in a small city: self-assured, involved, respected, a tireless worker, a leader, a community man. He projected a confident manner and was friendly but I would not call him chummy. I’m sure he rubbed some people the wrong way because he had strong opinions and expressed them forcefully.

He was a resident agent for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., as his father had been, and I suppose was competent at his profession because he seemed to be competent at everything, but locals likely will not remember him for selling life insurance. (If you want to talk about greatness in that field, you must look at another East Liverpool native, Ben Feldman, who wrote record-setting million-dollar policies with New York Life.)

Fewer folks would recall Leo’s role in passing the levy that built the Westgate School. Frank C. “Digger” Dawson said Lawrence sat on the school board with Jim Lowe (a native Englishman) and Ed Curry. Their successful campaign mantra was, “Lawrence, Lowe and Curry will build it in a hurry.”

When people think of Leo Lawrence, they remember his passion for sharing his knowledge of home gardening, especially for growing roses, dahlias and daffodils.

He held a college degree but apparently obtained the same level of training in horticulture as myself, which is to say, none. Gardening was his passion and source of local fame. He hosted a weekly call-in show on WOHI, the local AM radio station.

“Leo did that radio show for years. People just loved it,” said Ron Aughinbaugh, who was station manager. “When the station was located downtown he would come in and do the show from there, telling people how to prune their trees or whatever.”

Leo, recalled Dawson, “would answer what kind of fertilizer they needed. That radio show was very good.”

Aughinbaugh said Leo’s son, who was also named Leo C. Lawrence, worked as an engineer for WOHI, installing and repairing electronic equipment.

Digger and his wife Gretchen are among Leo’s daffodil disciples. The grounds around the rural Dawson home abound with daffodils and provide an annually observed rite of spring. Invited friends and their children swarm the sea of yellow, cutting off blossoms to gather as many bouquets as they wish. It being end of season, this benefits next year’s daffodils by obviating seed production, allowing plants to put their energy into bulbs.

Later, Digger will superintend planting more daffodils. “I get two football players; one digs up the clumps, the other digs holes and I drop in the bulbs,” he said.

I got to know Leo Lawrence through covering the Tri-State Pottery Festival. Leo ran, and usually judged and entered, the festival’s rose show. He was a mainstay of the East Liverpool Dahlia Society and its annual show. Dawson said dahlia culture was a British passion imported to East Liverpool by Jack Eccleston.

Dahlias and roses require a lot of attention, though, which is why I like daffodils. Tulips and hyacinths are wonderful flowering spring bulbs, but if you don’t feed them they die out. Daffodils, on the other hand, multiply and prosper whatever soil you stick them in. You just have to dig up and separate the bulb clumps every few years.

Leo did not care for daffodils in orderly beds. He liked them “naturalized,” planted in irregular drifts on a lawn, in woodland or on a bank, looking like they grew there wild. People drove past his and Helen’s Midway Lane home to see the daffodils.

The last time I met Leo Lawrence was in the hallway outside the radiology department at City Hospital, where I had recently taken a job in public relations. When I asked why he was there, he said he had throat cancer.

“I never smoked or drank. I didn’t deserve this,” he said angrily.

He died not long afterward, in 1991, at age 85.

Glenn Waight, venerable managing editor of The Review, listed Leo Lawrence among East Liverpool’s 100 most notable people of the 20th century.

In springtime, when glorious swaths of yellow daffodils along the city lanes raise their faces to the sun, dispelling the gray misery of a long, cold winter, share your smile with a thought for Leo Lawrence.