His father taught him discipline and the manly art of hunting.
“My father showed me how to shoot at an early age: .22s by seven, twelve-gauge by twelve. Packs of beagles with uncles, the works. I got very good with targets, as Southern boys tend to be, but put all weapons down at fifteen and never looked back.”
Yet many of Pickard’s classmates don’t even remember him having parents, let alone shooting guns. They recall Leonard and his older sister Gala living with an aunt and uncle, Ed and Yogi Verner. Their upbringing was far more plebian than that which Leonard recalls. His cousin Dan Pickard knew a city nerd unaccustomed to the great outdoors.
“I remember taking him fishing once on Lake Allatoona,” said Dan Pickard. “Lennie caught a catfish and went nuts, screaming and hollering as if he’d never seen a fish before.”
The one point upon which Leonard’s cousin and classmates do seem to agree is that he was brilliant.
“Lennie was not dumb, as you probably know,” said Dan Pickard. “The boy was super smart and could have done wonders.”
Pickard lettered in track, shot photos for the school newspaper, and was declared “most intellectual” in the 1963 Daniel O’Keefe High School yearbook. He played forward on the basketball team, ran cross country and rose to the rank of First Lieutenant in ROTC.
“Our drill team had chrome helmets, blue ascots, and white spats over our boots, with O’Keefe green and white shoulder braids,” he recalled. “I marched at the head of the column right, sometimes backwards, and called the cadence. The uniform had multiple insignia and patches, and—get this!—I had a chrome saber drawn and held to shoulder while marching. I learned to salute with it.”
He wasn’t all discipline. He was also a storyteller with a wry sense of humor.
“Lennie Pikurd,” chuckled classmate Mary Ann Haney, pronouncing his last name “Pik-urd,” instead of the more elegant “Pick-card” that Leonard prefers. “Lennie liked to live on the edge. Tease the girls. Craved attention. Excitement! He had a great wit, but he always acted just a little bit superior.”
That, he says, is because he was superior. Leonard Pickard led two lives, even when he was still in high school.
“O’Keefe4 was an island on the Georgia Tech campus,” he recalled.
His alma mater was undemanding, according to Pickard, but its proximity to Georgia Tech made it a mecca for the hyper-curious. He recalled Burroughs, Remington Rand, and IBM installing punch-card behemoths on campus—Univac forerunners of the PCs later developed by Apple and Microsoft. He spent as much time tinkering with early computers and browsing bound editions of Scientific American in the Price Gilbert Library (“a real pleasure dome for science students”) as he did with the ROTC or O’Keefe’s basketball team.
Which is not to say he had no social life. Moonlit hayrides past Stone Mountain5, Sunday school socials, requisite high school hops—he wooed women in the woods or on the tennis courts. But “Lennie” spent just as much time exploring the mind—his and those of his peers.
“O’Keefe was a platform from which I circled into distant groups and activities unknown to my co-students, for I never talked about it,” he said.
Influenced by his stepmother, he channeled his perceived superiority into an early and intense love of science. He tapped into youth programs at the National Science Foundation, International Science and Engineering Fair, Atomic Energy Commission, Westinghouse Science Talent Search . . .
Each year since the end of World War II, Westinghouse Electric had sponsored an annual competition to identify the forty best high school science students in the nation. On its face, the venerable prize appeared to be corporate America’s token appreciation of the scientists of tomorrow. Its deeper significance, according to Pickard, was that it fostered a pool of geniuses that helped steer the nation past the nuclear hazards of the Cold War. He counted himself among their number.6
“In 1996, the Westinghouse Science Talent Search7 did a fifty-year review of the prior 2000 student winners, listing their positions and achievements,” he said. “Of the 2000, six had Nobels. Many were National Academy of Science members. The internet is replete with Westinghouse examples.”
In the summer of 1962, as a high school junior, Pickard interned at the Argonne National Laboratory near the University of Chicago. He built two linear particle accelerators at a time when most teens thought accelerator meant gas pedal. By the time he was a senior, he’d won national science fair competitions two years running. One of those years included an all-expenses-paid trip to Seattle, where he got his picture in the paper, competed for $34,000 in scholarships, and delivered a lecture on “The Radiobiology of Pinocytosis.”8
Back home in Atlanta, most of his classmates had no idea how big a deal Lennie Pickard had become. Recruited by twenty-two colleges and universities, he accepted a Princeton scholarship, where he planned to dig even deeper into cellular biophysics and eventually nail down his own Nobel. He meant to step into big shoes at Princeton.
“First thing I did after dropping my luggage off at Patton Hall was wander down Nassau Street, turn left on Mercer, and stand before Einstein’s old place,” he said. “It was a modest eighteenth-century white clapboard house with a tiny front yard, screen doors, and a loft overlooking a small back yard—very humble.
“I stood at the front door for half an hour, but didn’t have the nerve to knock. He died just seven years earlier. Little did I know that the house was still occupied by his last wife and his secretary of fifty years, Helen Dukas. All his furnishings, books, files, and letters were still there. Likely they would have welcomed a young student like me.”
Missing Einstein was the first of many lost opportunities. Leonard was an awkward fit at Princeton, still very much invested in his ROTC training, but appalled by Vietnam. He thought the university would be a refuge from politics, not a cauldron.
“I joined the Cliosophic Society9, which invited Madame Nhu down to speak,” he said. “She appeared
