Transcription of Paul Leddy for the show Multiple Sclerosis: Understanding & Hope, #100
Lisa I’m a person who loves the ocean and loves boats. I don’t have one so I always rely upon other people’s generous boat lending. Last year, Paul Leddy invited me and Kevin Thomas the publisher of Maine magazine to be on his boat during the MS Harborfest. I was unable to go so I’ve regretted that every day since. This year I believe that Paul you’re doing it again and I believe Sean Thomas is going to be on the boat taking photographs if I understand correctly.
Paul: I just met Sean actually so I didn’t know that.
Lisa: I think that’s the arrangement and I’m so jealous because-
Paul: You’re always invited. You have a standing invitation, you and Kevin, both.
Lisa: Thank you. Thank you for doing the MS Regatta because we’ve been doing this about 10 years.
Paul: About 10 years, I think I missed a year or two in there.
Lisa: This is something that raises money obviously for multiple sclerosis and it brings together a lot of your different interests I think.
Paul: Community, sailing, and there’s all kinds of fund raisers that people get involved in because they like running or they like biking or this type of things. Sailing is my thing and actually skiing too so I’ll also get involved in the Tri for Cure in the winter time with skiing. If it’s something that’s somebody an individual is interested in that would fit right into raising funds for it, it makes it more of a purposeful challenge than just going out and having a race.
Lisa: As far as multiple sclerosis, you actually have people in your life that you know who suffer from this disease, it’s a devastating disease for which we have no cure, tell me how this has impacted you.
Paul: I have three people in my life, two closer than one. One is a very, very good friend of mine’s mother. This was the first person that I ever knew personally that who was diagnosed with MS. As you know, it has something to do with neurological parts of our body, but it really debilitates somebody in their motor skills some things like that but their mind state is pretty sharp. To see this beautiful woman now in needing of cane and assistance now and then she still, by my standard, is very young and vibrant but not so young and vibrant because of this disease.
Then in the past 10 or 15 years, a good friend of mine that I went to high school with also wass diagnosed with it. He works every day. He is my corp dork so to speak, it’s who I go to … he recommends some good wines for different foods although he thinks there’s no reason to pair wine with food you could just have wine. This is something that you can just see these people, and my other friend too, they lose a lot of weight, they lose a lot of motor skills. They’re not as active as they can be and it makes you really think about our own lives and how you really are lucky.
I feel lucky to get up in the morning and walk in the beach every morning. At my age, I might be feeling little creakier in there, but I feel a lot stronger than a lot of people my age that can’t feel strong.
Lisa: It does seem as though you live life pretty fully. I’m friends with you on Facebook. I see the pictures of you and your wife Jen and you’re out, you’re on boats, you’re skiing, you’re here, you’re there. I know you work very hard but you also really seem to embrace all that is good about life.
Paul: As Jen says, if I could only live in your head when she knows that I accentuate all of those things in our lives when we’re together or we’re talking to friends and I’ll tell them about sailing and this and that. She’s keenly aware of the other side which is probably the 90 percentile side of our life which is just the hard work that we end up doing, but yeah you’ve got to stop. Every single morning I’m on the beach if you see the posts on Facebook. Sometimes it’s just a picture of the sun rising and good morning to all my Facebook friends. We do, we get on the boat as often as we can.
In the winter time we’re at Sugarloaf skiing every weekend if we can and then we take breaks to go down. We’ve got houses in Florida that we’ll go visit as often as we possibly can, not as often as genuine like but again that work thing is in the way.
Lisa: You also tried to, it seems, incorporate bringing happiness to other people into your work. You are a builder, a master craftsman. You do a lot of work with aesthetics. There’s that happiness. You have also Willard Scoops in South Portland, which I don’t know if I mentioned this to you but I was there the other day and while I was there, there were two women. One, I think was from New York she said, “I’m here from out of town and your ice cream store is one of the first places I am going to.”
Paul: That’s right. Oh my god, we do get that a lot though. We get people that come out of town and either they’ve been to us once before or they heard of us and they stop. It’s just ice cream but it’s good. We make it ourselves and-
Lisa: Oh no, it’s not just ice cream, I can tell you this.
Paul: Come on.
Lisa: I mean the salt caramel nut on that and I don’t eat a lot of things, but even John who our audio guru over here it’s not just ice cream. If you’re going to have ice cream, which I don’t very often, you need to go to Willard Scoops.
Paul: That’s awesome. It’s awesome to hear and I have to give most of that credit … I get a lot of the credit to Jen. When we decided to get into it, we weren’t going to do it unless it was different in quality and it reflects everything else that we try to do in our life. If I’m going to build a house, I don’t want to just build a house like… I don’t even know how to vinyl side like I don’t know how to put that on house. I don’t want to and I never want to learn so we took the same philosophy of quality and natural and everything towards ice cream.
It pays off to an extent. It’s probably more tedious. It’s more money for ingredients so your profit margin is less, but yeah, we get a lot of satisfaction when you get a line out the door and everybody is happy and everybody when they’re getting an ice cream is complimentary. They come back from out of town like you’ve suggests and can’t wait. We’ve got a Facebook page so we get people from all over the country really commenting on the Facebook page so that is pretty cool.
Lisa: Ice cream might suggest you’re an individual who likes sweet things and likes dessert, but you’re actually a very well-balanced individual. You and I were talking and you eat a lot of organic foods. You said maybe 70% organic. You are very much into fruits and vegetables and cooking in a healthy way. You’ve gone gluten-free. You’re being very mindful of your health.
Paul: Yeah, you get to a point if you weren’t… Again, if you look at people that have debilitating diseases or just don’t take care of themselves that in its own way is debilitating as you could imagine. Again, I’m very lucky to have a wife who is very conscious about what we eat. I’m not a tough sell though. I used to certainly love to eat bagels and sweets, cookies in the afternoon and stuff like that. Again, the last probably five or six years in my life with more healthy products out there if you look around and see gluten-free bakeries that are now available.
Organic food is now available in, for crying out loud, Hannaford and Shaw’s. You don’t have to go too far out of your way. We would eat 100% organic if you could but you can’t. I mean that’s a really tall order. Then gluten-free, as I explained to you that came about really from Frank Tarantino who suggested if I want to ski for the rest of my life and not have ice packs and Advil or cortisone shots that I probably should look at gluten building up in my joints. He suggested I try it for 60 days and that was about five or six years ago and it was hard to do at first. I first tried gluten rice, “What’s gluten?” Then what he told me about gluten was I’m like, “How the heck do you do that, I mean gluten is in everything?”
It turns out it’s easier than you think than when you get into that routine and now that there’s more gluten-free alternatives out there, it’s actually piece of cake but once you started going down that road like I recently cut out most of the time, cut out sugar and dark chocolate does not count by the way in the sugar thing, so every once in a while I will eat some of our ice cream but it’s not something that I go for a little bit. Once you cut that out, you’re craving stops. You don’t have that so if you can get over that hump like the gluten hump for me and everything else, if you’re willing to try it and you get over that hump, then you actually don’t feel good when you go the other way again when you go back there.
If I went to Q Street and had breakfast instead of eating granola and fruit or something in the morning, I actually don’t feel good. Before I never knew that, I just meet the crew down the local greasy spoon and have bacon and eggs in the morning and I just don’t do that anymore.
Lisa: Paul, I am looking forward to someday spending time with you and Jen on your boat, the Crazy Horse. I thank you for putting Crazy Horse into the MS Harborfest again this year for the 10th year I guess minus one and thank you for all that you do to bring joy and good tasting ice cream and beautiful homes and design into the community.
Paul: You’re welcome Lisa. Thank you and again you and Kevin know you always have an invitation, anybody here Steve and those guys I’d love to take you guys out. I thank you guys actually for giving me your banner to fly on the boat in the parade and sponsoring Crazy Horse. I’ve always gotten a sponsor, but it’s nice to have a sponsor that I have a real connection to. Thank you for that.
Lisa: Anybody is looking for the Crazy Horse out on the bay. It will be under the Maine magazine.
Paul: Yup, on one side it says Maine home and design and the other side it says Maine mag and it will be a lot of fun actually. You told me Sean’s onboard. I think he’ll have a lot of fun. Crazy crew he’s going to have to watch himself but we’ve got a good crew.
Lisa: Thanks Paul. I appreciate your coming in.
Paul: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.