Among other things, Leon “Buddy” Glover was known for walking everywhere — for lacing up his trademark black hightop Chucks and venturing out from his Green Street home in Lancaster.

Didn’t matter how far he had to go. Didn’t matter if someone offered a ride. Buddy, far more often than not, was pounding the pavement.

And always willing to go the extra mile.

Who knows how many students followed the lead of Glover, who for 33 years (1971-2004) was an administrator in the School District of Lancaster — and a driving force within the community far longer than that. Who knows how many got up to speed. And who knows how many of his fellow educators forged a better path because of his guidance.

Glover died last week at age 71. While it would be correct to say he was a pillar of the community, the better analogy would be to say that he was a dynamo, that he was forever powering (and empowering) those around him, forever making sure they were in step.

“He had a presence,” said Tim Glackin, a retired teacher and basketball coach who began his career in education at McCaskey in 1985.

“He was definitely the glue guy,” said Jerry Johnson, a basketball guy invoking a basketball term.

Certainly Buddy made sure everybody came together, that everything operated more smoothly. Johnson, who two decades ago forged one of the great hoops careers in McCaskey history, can surely appreciate that now more than ever, as he is currently the athletic director and boys’ basketball coach at La Academia Partnership Charter School in Lancaster. 

“Anything you needed,” Johnson said, “(Glover) was definitely that person.”

Johnson can remember sitting in Glover’s back yard and getting life advice. Others remember him criss-crossing Lancaster on foot each summer to discuss with students about to enter high school just what they might expect, and what would be expected of them.

Invariably there would be those who would falter, who would contemplate dropping out. That would often earn them an audience with Glover, who would say, “We need you to stay. What can we do to make that happen?”

Again, how many lives did he save? How much better a place was the district and community because of him?

“He was there to help any way he could,” said Dirk Montgomery, a 1983 McCaskey graduate who for years has worked in various capacities for the Pennsylvania State Police (and, full disclosure, was once a co-worker of mine, at LNP). “He always pushed education to the forefront.”

Buddy was the guy who organized weekend college trips for students, just to acclimate them — to give them a vision, to establish a goal. And he was the one who dispensed advice to those like Mike Mitchell, Montgomery’s classmate (and hoops teammate), when he was settling on a college choice.

Mitchell, still a math teacher in the district and formerly a boys’ basketball assistant under the late Steve Powell, eventually settled on Shippensburg. And when he did, he recalled Glover telling him the following: “Because of who you are and your ethnicity, you’re going to stand out. That could be in a positive or negative way. Make sure to always make that positive.”

It is advice Mitchell took to heart, and advice he found himself passing along to students in subsequent years — “maybe not the same verbiage,” he said, “but the same sentiment.”

Glackin, for his part, recalls that his first interaction with Glover came after he had a run-in with a student — a kid named Russell — early in his teaching career. Russell was talking in the back of Glackin’s home room during morning announcements one day, and Glackin called him on it.

“Chill,” Russell told him.

“I didn’t respond real well to that,” Glackin said the other day. “To me that meant, ‘Shut up.’ I went off on him.”

That earned them both an audience with Glover, then McCaskey’s assistant principal. The way Glackin remembers it, he and Russell sat facing each other, with Glover between them.

“We came away shaking hands, and had a much better relationship,” Glackin said of the student. “Buddy’s the one who facilitated that discussion. He said 90 percent of the problems between teachers and students came from miscommunication. That struck me and stayed with me, throughout my teaching and coaching career.”

As it happens, Buddy was Russell-like in his formative years; he once told a reporter that he was “the Green Street bad boy” and “a problem” at that point in his life. His mom, Romaine Banks, set him straight. As he put it in that same interview, she was the one who “always stressed that nothing can keep you down unless you wanted to be kept down.”

He graduated from McCaskey in 1967 and Gettysburg College four years later, while competing in football at both places. He went on to earn his master’s in guidance/counseling from Millersville and his principal certificate from Penn, while steadily moving up the chain at SDL.

He notably became the first Black principal in the district when he took over at Edward Hand Junior High (now Southeast Middle School) in 1986, a position he held until becoming assistant superintendent four years later. While he retired in 2004, he was a candidate for district superintendent in ‘08, a position that ultimately went to Pedro Rivera, despite considerable public sentiment for Glover.

“Now that the decision has been made,” he told a reporter following Rivera’s hire, “I hope that the community will not be divided and that we put the kids in the center and move forward.”

Always that. Always putting one foot in front of the other.

The journey didn’t end there, and shouldn’t end now. There are those who believe that Hand/Southeast Middle School, which Glover once attended, should be renamed in his honor. Glackin, for one, called it “a no-brainer,” and others are loath to disagree.

“His legacy deserves it,” Johnson wrote in a text, “and he is an irreplaceable icon to Lancaster city!!!!”

Irreplaceable? Maybe so. His hightop Chucks will be difficult to fill. But if you look closely, you can still see his footprints, all over town.