Br. Ignatius Leo

Brother I. Leo's first teaching assignment was at De La Salle Academy in Kansas City, Missouri, where he spent three years before he was transferred to Christian Brothers High School in St. Joseph, Missouri. In 1926 he left St. Joseph and was assigned to De La Salle High School in Chicago which enabled him to complete his B.S. and M.S. degrees at DePaul University. Leo was asked by the Provincial to go to Catholic University in Washington, D.C., to complete his doctorate studies in chemistry so as to prepare him to teach at the newly acquired St. Mary's College in Winona, Minnesota. He completed his studies and spent only four years at St. Mary's when he was assigned in 1940 to Christian Brothers College in Memphis where he was appointed Dean of the reopened Junior College. For the next fourteen years he was to move back and forth several times between St. Mary's College in Winona and Christian Brothers College in Memphis. In 1959 he returned to Memphis and spent the next thirty-four years at CBC in a variety of jobs from chemistry teacher to Director of Public Relations to Director of the University Archives, an archive that bears his name today. On January 14, 1994, at age eighty-nine, he died of complications following a stroke. He had been a De La Salle Christian Brother for seventy-seven years.