Began Second Career at Age of 69 : At 103, Owner of Health Food Store Is Still on the Job
Frederick Leon rises early each morning, exercises, showers, dresses, eats breakfast and heads for the store--a regimen he has followed six days a week for the past 30 years or so.
Nothing unusual in that, you say, but Frederick Leon is 103 years old, a robust advertisement for his Stay-Well Health Foods Warehouse on Seventh Avenue in downtown San Diego’s produce district.
He presides daily behind the cluttered front counter of his warehouse, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and no one can remember him taking a rest break except maybe to feed the pigeons. The pigeons eat a healthy diet of rolled oats.
Leon’s senses of sight and hearing may have dulled a bit over the past century but his tongue is as sharp as ever. He bosses his faithful customers about in a brusque manner, and totes up items with a pencil, ignoring the electronic calculator.
Barks His Prices
“There’s no place in the world you can get it cheaper, lady,” he barked at a woman who had the temerity to question a price. “This here, 80 cents. Anyplace else, you pay $2,” he said of a bar of lemon soap. “That, lady, is $10 more at other places,” he said, gesturing at an giant tin of pure maple syrup retailing for $22.50.
One longtime customer related how, since he and his family moved to Arizona a few years ago, he makes an annual trip back to San Diego and Stay-Well to stock up on Leon’s health foods because he can’t find the quality and variety anyplace else. He buys in bulk and thus earns 20% off the retail price. But, he said, he’d make the trip to see Leon and get the best, even without the wholesale discount.
For his local customers, Leon offers free parking in a lot he keeps an eye on personally. “You want to go shopping someplace else. You leave your car in there. I watch it like a hawk while you’re gone,” he promised one woman. To another, he advised: “Save your tapes. When you spend $40, then you get something free”--two bars of soap or a box of tea. To the third in line who was showing a bit of impatience, he warned: “Never be in a hurry, lady.”
Started As Hobby
Leon wasn’t always a health food guru. He enlisted in the Navy at age 17, around the turn of the century, and served through two world wars before being forced to retire because of age restrictions. At 69, he bought a 5,000-square-foot warehouse at the humble end of Seventh Avenue and opened his health food market. He said he started it as a hobby and watched it become a multimillion-dollar business.
Unlike his famous ancestor Juan Ponce de Leon, Frederick Leon has discovered the fountain of youth. His simple diet and regimen of exercise and hard work aren’t likely to be turned into a best-selling fitness guide, but Leon has no reason to change after 103 birthdays and, he says, never a sick day.
He told a writer for a nutrition magazine once that he was raised on goat’s milk, to which he credits his immunity to disease. He says he’s never had a cold and wouldn’t know what a bad cold was like.
His favorite food: “Fruit. All kinds of fruit. Oranges are the best.” The fruit, raw milk, nuts, whole wheat grains, supplemented by Vitamins A and C, are his diet staples, although his store stocks almost everything which is organically grown, pure and sugar-free, including such exotic herbs as fenugreek, agrimony, calamus and papaya leaf.
One health tip he will pass on to customers: Don’t ever eat in a restaurant if you can avoid it. And one definite no-no in any healthy diet: sugar.
Does he drink hard liquor? Leon gave his head a vigorous negative shake and explained: “I’d never waste my money.”
There is a drink in sunny Spain, his birthplace, that has softened Leon’s Spartan spirit. “They make it out of almonds and honey. When you drink it, you don’t have to eat all day,” he said with a faraway look in his eyes.
In fact, he confessed, if he didn’t have to run his business six days a week, year-round, “I would go over to Spain every six months or so,” and probably sample some more of that ambrosian brew made of almonds and honey.
