Eric Leadbetter

Eric Leadbetter

Eric Leadbetter was born March 3, 1936 in the town of Workington in Cumberland, England to Charles and Ann Leadbetter. His family line is traced mostly of fisherman, with a few bootleggers and the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth in the family tree. From Cumberland, the family moved to the Cottswalds, where most of his childhood was spent. He had memories of living in World War II England as a boy, and could recall running to hide with his mother in the fireplace when the air raid sirens alerted the village of a luftwaffe bombing attack. In true British fashion, he spent the rest of his life looking back with a sentimental fondness and esteem for wartime England.

At the tender age of eight, he was sent to a preparatory boarding school called Little Abbey, and later to St Edward’s Academy in Oxford. At school he excelled in sports, crew, track and field, rugby and cricket. His name was still engraved and on display in the St Edward’s school hall for a record he held in track and field when the family went back and visited England in the late 1980s.

Returning home from school on summers and holidays, he would see his mom and dad and younger brother, Graham. A highlight of his youth was a small scale railroad steam engine and track erected by his father on the family property.

After completing his schooling, he followed his parents to Edmonton, Alberta, as his dad was building a trucking business there.  When he wasn’t attending the university of Alberta in Edmonton, he would drive trucks across Canada.

He moved to Seattle and attended graduate school at the University of Washington, studying classics and comparative literature. For a brief time, he lived in lower Queen Anne and drove a convertible sports car. Seattle was still a small “big“ city in the early ’60s, full of a fresh innocence, and he remembered going to pubs and taverns where everyone in the establishment would sing along to folk songs.

He moved to Perkins Lane in Magnolia, a narrow and winding street that hugs the side of a bluff. It was there that he met an attractive, young nurse who was living down the lane named Nancy.  Considering her to be, in his words,  “the Sophia Loren of North America,” he courted her enthusiastically until she agreed to marry him.  They moved into a beach house on Perkins Lane that has since washed into the sea.

After some years of marriage, they moved to Kirkland, and in 1971 their first child, Holly, was born. Their son, Colin, was born in 1975. The next year they moved to their home in Woodinville, where they spent the next 50 years.

In the 1970s, Eric was a beloved Latin and French teacher at Bellevue High School. Back then, soccer was a sport still being discovered in the U.S., and he agreed to be the soccer coach for Bellevue High. The first year, he had to search the halls for potential players and try to convince them to sign up for the team. By the end of the season, he led Bellevue High School to the state championship, and the following year almost every boy in the high school tried out for the team.

A bit later in Eric’s teaching career, he would take groups of students to England and France and Greece, letting his students explore the streets of Paris and London unsupervised. His students greatly loved him, and a Bellevue High School yearbook was dedicated to him, their favorite teacher.

Eric loved to fly remote controlled model airplanes at Mary Moore Park and kept up the hobby until his planes were destroyed in a garage fire.

With his father‘s trucking business still in his bones, he started a business hauling gravel and topsoil in dump trucks while he was still teaching, until eventually he retired from teaching and ran his small business full-time.

With his young family, he would go on countless road trips and camping trips. In the 1980s, he and Nancy purchased a cabin on Eliza Island, a small private island in the San Juans with no electricity and only one vehicle operated by the island caretaker. Over the years, Eric returned again and again to this idyllic place with family and friends, making his final visit as recently as last summer.

In retirement, he enjoyed traveling with Nancy and sometimes with his longtime neighbors to Mexico and the Holy Land and Europe.

In 2015, Nancy suffered a stroke, which limited her in speech and mobility.  For the last 11 years of his life, Eric supported her with unflagging love and devotion.

He and Nancy enjoyed dining out on the weekends, and he would laugh as he recounted how about a dozen times anonymous strangers has surprised them by paying their bill. Charmed onlookers were apparently moved by seeing a cute old couple on a date and the kindheartedness that exuded from Eric.

At the age of 83, he entered into full communion with the Byzantine Catholic Church and stayed close to the sacraments thereafter, including receiving the anointing of the sick and Holy Communion on the day of his death.

Eric dearly loved his four granddaughters, Thecla, Aquilina, Marina and Petra, and he would mark their developmental milestones with enthusiasm and pride.

In September 2025, Eric and Nancy celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary surrounded by their children, son- and daughter-in-law, and grandchildren.

Countless acquaintances and even strangers have said over the years that he is one of the kindest men they have ever known. He had great love in his heart, and family members report that they virtually never heard him say a disparaging word about anyone.

His crowning quality, however, was his unbounded love for others, often expressing itself in kindness and curiosity about the lives of people he met. Even in his final visit to the hospital, he wanted to know all about the nurses and doctors who were taking care of him.  This graciousness and goodness endeared him to those he met throughout the course of his life.

Eric passed on to eternity the age of 89 on January 14, 2026.

May his memory be eternal!