Ghost Riders of Saucon (Part 3): Quiet, Then Not—Barry Lee Lesher

Wouldn’t it all be neat and simple if Wayne Eisenhart could be presented as a charismatic, tragic anti-hero, and his friend and eventual nemesis, Barry Lee Lesher, an an irredeemable, hopelessly damaged figure?

There’s certainly a strong current of this basic narrative among all those who present the mid-1970s Hellertown of Legend. And I feel it myself, pretty deeply at times. Wayne somehow feels more accessible to me and magnetic. Barry Lee is harder to get—a child of chaos, and harder to like. He did a lot of wicked, immoral things, to be sure. But Wayne was no angel either, not eventually.

But I also feel compelled to get Barry Lee right, too. More below on the personal reasons for that. “Not liking” him just isn’t good enough. I think there is more to his issues.

I’m honestly surprised the whole story of Wayne and Barry hasn’t been exploited as a sleazy true crime book already. As you will learn, it’s beyond interesting and dramatic on stilts.

There are a few competent writer-hacks in our area (hacks whom I admire much) who would also be great fits to bring life to such a project, and for all know, they’re working away as I write. But I’m too interested in good writing to spend time writing “true crime.” I want to go for the glory, not the money. And true crime sleaze doesn’t offer enough flexibility for me.

That this story has lain dormant for half a century, left for some California-born outsider (yours truly) to bring it to light, is a sad reflection on how little imagination and care for recent local history the Lehigh Valley seems to possess. Stolid, unimaginative, suspicious, phlegmatic—all those great Pennsylvania personality traits lead to a culture that doesn’t remember what it is or even know how to articulate its own tales. What a shitty state of affairs that is. But I digress …

Barry Lee Lesher, front (with hands in pockets) from the 1970 Hellertown-Lower Saucon High School yearbook, along with other vocational-ed students. (Photo: Ancestry.com)

It’s also simply been much harder—so far—for me to get good information about Barry Lee Lesher before he started making national newspaper headlines for all the wrong reasons. Many of Wayne’s relatives don’t want to talk about Wayne, but it’s even worse with Barry Lee.

There are some basic facts.

Barry Lee was born in Fountain Hill in March 1953, to Ernest Fred Lesher and mother Dorothy Lesher (neé Grim), both of Pennsylvania German-American ancestry, along with, well, just about everyone in any Saucon Valley tale.

The shadow of real tragedy lingers around his birth because his older infant brother, Ernest Fred, was either stillborn or died shortly after birth the year before in 1952. So there was that: A dead sibling who took his father’s names the year before he came into the world. People have been benighted in life for less.

But then there’s almost 20 years of quiet when it comes to Barry Lee. It’s obviously long before social media, but normally, something pops up for most kids growing up in mid-century America: A Cub Scouts Pine Derby photo in the local paper. A Boys Club photo. A birthday message that grandpa puts in the paper. A petty crime. But there’s just nothing for Barry Lee.

Finally, in 1970, he shows up in a Hellertown High yearbook. He looks shy and a little awkward in dark shirtsleeves and dark trousers, a gentle smile, hands partly in his pockets, and shaggy dark hair. The impression is callowness and innocence. There’s not a hint of what’s to come.

It’s been my experience that kids who don’t get the attention they need often also get little public recognition. Not always, but often. I sometimes wonder if Barry Lee was held in the kind of esteem he deserved as a boy. Personally, given all that happened later, I doubt it.

Some people would eventually call Barry Lee “evil.” I do not agree with that, but I understand the impulse. Some of the stuff he did was deeply callous. Or so it seemed.

If I hadn’t spoken to a another neighbor of mine, Andrew Danyluk, who still lives in Hellertown, I, too, might have stopped there. Danyluk is the kind of person that makes Hellertown great: He’s very smart, very well-informed, restrained, and remarkably nonjudgemental. He also knew both Wayne Eisenhart and Barry Lee Lesher at Hellertown High, and he liked them both, and his perspective offers something few others offer: Balance.

We’ll start Part 4 with my interesting interview with Danyluk.