Lynyrd Skynyrd namesake dies at 77

Historic City News has learned that earlier today, Leonard Skinner, the high school gym teacher who inspired Lynyrd Skynyrd’s band name, has died at a nursing home in Riverside at age 77.

In recent years, Skinner has battled Alzheimer’s disease.

While a gym teacher and basketball coach during the ’60s at Robert E. Lee High School in Jacksonville, Skinner had a reputation for sending male students to the principal’s office because their hair was too long.

Those male students included future Rock and Roll Hall of Fame members Ronnie Van Zant and Gary Rossington, who named their band “Lynyrd Skynyrd” as a sarcastic tribute.

It seems that Skinner didn’t really remember the guys in the band from their school days and that he probably wasn’t all that mean to them either. He was just enforcing the rules. Still, his name — in that wonderfully wacky way it was respelled — became part of a legend.

High School students in the 1970’s remember fondly the Southern rock ‘n’ roll bands from that era — the Allman Brothers, Charlie Daniels, Marshall Tucker — and, of course, Skynyrd.

Three musicians, including Ronnie Van Zant, and one road crew member died in an airplane crash in 1977 — but, in later years, others who survived were said to have become friends with Skinner.

Funeral arrangements have not yet been reported.