The friends of Leonard “Boogie” Weinglass gathered the other night to wish him well as he turned 80. No, that is not a misprint. The eternally youthful Weinglass, dressed in fashionably torn jeans and T-shirt and sneakers, has now entered his ninth decade in the midst of his very own legend.
“How about that?” he said Thursday evening, Oct. 21, as about 60 of his closest friends and his wife, Gail, and daughter, Skye, gathered at Linwood’s restaurant in Owings Mills. “A guy named Boogie hitting 80.”
He still can’t get over it. This is a guy who grew up impoverished on Violet Avenue off lower Reisterstown Road and scraped his way through adolescence hustling football pools and blank report cards, and found himself immortalized in Barry Levinson’s movie classic “Diner.”
He’s a guy who matriculated at Benny’s Pool Hall and Knocko’s when he should have been in class, and showed up at Forest Park High School and City College only long enough to lead their varsity basketball teams in scoring. (He didn’t graduate high school until he was 20, owing to his reluctance to attend actual classes.)
He’s the guy who set records for teenage street fights, and then decided to take up serious boxing when he was in his mid-30s.
He’s the guy who created a funky little boutique called Merry-Go-Round, which grew to nearly 1,500 stores in 40 different states.
He’s a guy who has quietly given away untold millions to organized charities, to legions of needy kids, to old friends, to extended family, to total strangers who need a helping hand.
Or to put it all another way, here’s what Forbes Magazine once said of him:
“Human history has produced exactly one Johann Sebastian Bach, one Sir Isaac Newton, and — for better or worse — one Leonard (Boogie) Weinglass. [He] is a true original — a streetwise Baltimore bad boy who grew up to be, by turns, hippie, founder of a successful … $1 billion nationwide chain. Merry-Go-Round became a Wall Street darling, and big-time players like Fidelity Investments, Bear Stearns, and Donald Trump tried to horn in on the action.”
There have been tough times, too. Growing up in poverty. Watching Merry-Go-Round collapse after Boogie had slipped into retirement and his partner, Harold N. Goldsmith, was killed in a plane crash in 1991. Surviving a horrific struggle with tongue and throat cancer.
But he’s still here.
He lives part of each year in Baltimore and part in Aspen, Colorado, where he and Gail have a spread called Merry-Go-Ranch, which includes 10 bedrooms, a full-size indoor basketball court, an indoor track, a tennis court, a racquetball court, swimming pool, steam room, guest house, stables for their horses and 21 acres of nature’s unbounded gorgeousness.
This is widely considered to be a long way from Violet Avenue.
At his birthday party last week, he seemed a little awed as he made his way through the crowd and a disc jockey played rock ‘n’ roll songs from the 1950s. Handed a microphone, Boogie pointed to old friends and had an affectionate wisecrack for each.
Then he told everybody he couldn’t believe he was 80.
Nobody else could believe it, either. He’s still in the middle of his very own legend.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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