When Leonard J. Goldstein wrote notes to his family and friends, he often doodled a smiling self-portrait at the bottom of the page. It was a characteristic show of good humor from a loving husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather who spent 40 summers in Truro.
He died at Saint John’s on the Lake, a retirement community in Milwaukee, on July 1, 2025 at 98.
Leonard was born on Feb. 1, 1927, in Yonkers, N.Y., the first child of Arthur and Sara Goldstein. His parents were Lithuanian immigrants who worked in the furniture and silverware trades. As a teenager, Leonard took the trolley from their St. Andrews Place walkup to his job as a soda jerk at a local pharmacy, stopping along the way with his sister, Gladys, to buy cakes from Dugan’s bread truck.
The world’s upheavals punctuated his childhood. In 1937, 10-year-old Leonard watched the Hindenburg fly over Yonkers on its doomed trip to New Jersey. Two years later, he listened in his synagogue as a boy from Vienna described the horrors of Kristallnacht.
In 1944, he entered Princeton University through an Army Reserve program. After an eventful six months on campus — he once had dinner with Albert Einstein — he trained in Maryland, New Jersey, and Alabama before shipping out to occupied Japan in 1945. He earned a marketing degree from New York University the next year and soon was working at Jacob Ruppert’s Brewery on Third Avenue.
He met his future wife, Diana, at the Colony Beach Club in Yonkers, and he proposed to her at the Barnum & Bailey Circus as elephants strolled past. He called it a “lucky break” in his self-published memoir, adding, “I still wonder how I had the courage to ask her.” They were married for over 70 years.
Leonard started at the Miller Brewing Co. as a field sales manager in 1962. He quickly advanced, ascending from vice president of sales to president of the company in 1988. A Fortune Magazine profile described him as a “jolly,” extroverted leader who once appeared at a meeting “disguised as the Masked Marauder, Miller Lite’s wrestler mascot.” After retiring in 1993, he was a lecturer in entrepreneurship and marketing at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Lubar School of Business.
In 1983, Leonard and Diana bought a summer home at 14 Ryder Beach Road. “We just fell in love completely with Truro,” said Diana, “and our summer friends there were extra special.”
One of their closest friends was Boston College Professor Mike Peters, whom Leonard met on the beach in the early 1980s. “We spent many a day together under an umbrella on Corn Hill Beach,” Mike said. “All of a sudden, we’d look at our watches and realize we’d spent the whole day chatting.”
Leonard wrote in his memoir that Truro’s sand, sun, and ocean air were the “perfect recipe for a different closeness, for revealing more, for letting go and letting others in.” Among the highlights of these idyllic summers were scavenger hunts with his grandchildren, chamber concerts with Diana, and lobster rolls from PJ’s in Wellfleet. When his family found clams and the occasional mussel on Ryder Beach, they steamed them in Miller Beer and ate them in “slobster bibs.”
Leonard particularly enjoyed early-morning bicycle rides with his friend David Rose. They rose at 5:30 a.m., biked along Old County Road, and circled the harbor in Wellfleet before returning to Truro.
He also found great pleasure in hiking the coastal heathlands with Diana. In 2006, they donated five acres overlooking the head of Bound Book to the Truro Conservation Trust. The parcel includes about one-quarter mile of the old railroad bed stretching south from Ryder Beach Road, now known as “Diana’s Trail.”
“Living here in this special place, it’s magic,” Leonard said in 2006.
When declining health prevented him from traveling to the Outer Cape, Leonard read aloud The Boys in the Boat and sang Gershwin songs to Diana.
“She was absolutely the love of his life and his reason for being,” said their youngest daughter, Susan. “He loved her more than I’ve ever seen anyone love anyone else. They even shared an email address.”
Leonard is survived by his wife, Diana, of Milwaukee; his sister, Gladys Lekarew of Florida; daughter Laura Goldstein and husband Carl Landgren of Milwaukee; daughter Nancy Sussman and husband Ira Sussman of Highland Park, Ill.; daughter Susan Goldstein and husband Jonathan Curtis of New York City and Truro; grandchildren Joe Sussman, Jane Sussman, Sarah Jursik, and Julie Jursik and husband Noah Delin; and great-grandson Owen Arthur Delin. He was predeceased by his grandson Charlie Sussman.
